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Comment by Angela Neiderer-Staub on November 19, 2009 at 2:50pm

I was wondering how you all got your books published. My mom and I would like to write about surviving CHD & Heart Transplantation. We don't know where to start though once we are done! Any thoughts???

Comment by Dianne Joan Hartling/Oliver on September 10, 2009 at 6:13pm

Hi everyone here, I just joined and amazingly you have a group that is exactly what i'm looking into. I recently wrote my story down, (its on my wall) also on facebook for my own peace of mind and to share what I went through and got alot of responses on it and people said I should write a book about it. I thought what a great idea, but I don't know the first step or how to do that. Where do I start? Other than writing it all down. Maybe even a total autobiography of my entire life too, because its a one of a kind story!

Comment by Brian A. & Dorothea (AOP) Hartford on April 13, 2009 at 8:42am

Jay...Love Kool Cleve! Where can I get your book? Plenty of grandkids to spoil.

Brian

Comment by Brian A. & Dorothea (AOP) Hartford on April 13, 2009 at 8:40am

My best to Nick. Hope he enjoyes every day like I do.

Comment by Jay Robare on April 11, 2009 at 3:47pm

Read through your web site and got inspired... This is Kool Cleve, he is one of the characters in my children's book: The bear with no Hair

Comment by Susan May on April 11, 2009 at 3:15pm

Hi Jay,
Welcome to the group. I've written a book called "Nick's New Heart" about my son who received a heart transplant 18 years ago. He has just celabrated his 20th birthday. The book is about not only my son but our family and how we survived and thrived having a chronicaly member.

www.susanCmay.com

Comment by Brian A. & Dorothea (AOP) Hartford on March 24, 2009 at 10:30am

Life is good!Brian A. Hartford Word count 1520
One Time Rights


Life Is Good

In 1981 I quit the insurance business three times in two weeks. Why?
In 1966, I was a college graduate and had started a career in the retail business at the urging of my desperate father. Prior to that, I had wandered the halls of two universities for four-plus years as a mediocre get-by student. I had changed majors as often as girlfriends and tried to avoid the draft. It was a classic story of a military brat. Retail seemed like the logical choice for me, since I had supplemented meager funds for education expenses by working for various retail stores as a part-time salesman. In fact, I was the only guy that ever had money while attending college. This was in contrast to my hard working and focused, studious roommates. Everybody had a plan to be a lawyer or doctor, and each of them was quite dedicated to that goal. I had no such plan, and no such dedication. To paraphrase a line from an old Eagles song, Did I get tired, or just get lazy?
With my high-ranking naval officer dad’s influence and connections, I landed an entry-level position with an up-scale Fifth Avenue Manhattan department store. I found the position exciting and I was good at it. I soon was part of the élite of the young lions, and landed a position as associate buyer in the home furnishings division. I was on my way financially and way ahead of my apprentice lawyer and medical intern college classmates, who were still broke and still using ketchup for tomato sauce on pasta.
I saw that I would soon be able to afford a great apartment, new furniture, a car, and a wife. At the age of twenty-three I was on my way up, and I took my place in the club car of the Long Island Rail Road every morning, wearing my three piece suit, leather attaché’ case in hand, the New York Times tucked under my arm. I was settled into my job, loving my work, and planning to have kids and buy a house in a few years. Uncle Sam had other ideas.
My Selective Service classification changed to 1A within a year after graduation. A close friend has just died on the DMZ in the jungles of Vietnam. With exquisitely poor timing, the draft board found me physically fit, and noted that I was although married still childless, and thus I suppose expendable. What to do? I enlisted in the Marine Corps. My Navy Admiral Dad was convinced I did it just to spite him; but in my heart I truly felt I should serve with the best, and in my mind the best was the US Marines. Serve, I did. (A fictionalized account of some experiences is laid out in Echo! Five! Hotel!)
I and the world had changed by 1970 when I returned to civilian life. I was father to a beautiful girl and returned to the retail life in Manhattan. I soon found out that I had sinned by serving in Vietnam (a fact that was hammered into many of us) and thereby had missed those critical years of advancement in the retail hierarchy. Just picking up where I left off was not really an option!
I had nightmares. I was sullen, woke up in cold sweats, hit the deck when cars backfired, and cringed when a chopper flew overhead. I slept with a loaded 45 pistol under my pillow. I had no patience for civilians and their petty problems. I began to drink to excess, smoke too much, get into fights, and found that I was gradually distancing myself from my wife. I actually had panic attacks when the LIR went into the tunnel to Penn Station. I sought help from a physician provided by my employer; he gave me some pills. I was soon looking for a new job; it seems my employers felt they didn’t need a killer of babies on their payroll. All of this happened long before the military or the civilian world wanted to recognize post traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, now an everyday term.
I stayed in retail (although with a string of different employers), stayed married, dealt with some of my demons, and moved out of New York to Northern Virginia. I and my wife bought a house and focused on raising our daughter. My psychosis subsided. Or, should I say, it got lost in alcohol and cheating on my wife? I seemed to find some strange satisfaction with frequent conquests; with my position as a retail store manager, surrounded by woman, I had many opportunities. It was the ‘70s and I thought I had the world in my pocket.
My philandering resulted in a year of marriage counseling, reconciliation, and finally a consensual divorce. I had a rebound marriage to a single mother of a teenage son; that ended badly. I lost, among other things, the love and respect of my daughter. I also lost my high paying job shortly after my second marriage. It was the early ‘80s, when government and many other employers were finding they needed to exercise “reduction in force”; I got riffed. I was now unemployed and overqualified for middle retail management. I was on working on my second divorce, living on unemployment, painting houses on the side, and sponging off my employed wife.
Actually, taking advantage of a generous severance check and cashing in a life insurance policy allowed me to remain solvent and continue to meet my new and old financial responsibilities. My divorce lawyer called me the nicest freaking guy he had ever come across. I was somehow comforted in the knowledge I kept my obligations. Hell, I even paid a mortgage and child support to my first wife so her boyfriend could live in my house for free! What a nice guy I was.
I did learn that there was a world outside the gray flannel suite crowd, and found that manual work granted a certain freedom. Dressed in my painting clothes, with hundred dollar bills in my pocket for the first time, I would go to 7-11 store every morning and watch the suited robots, stressed out, waiting impatiently in line to buy their papers and coffee before the long commute to a neon-lighted, stuffy office or (as in my former case) the cave-like, sunless bowels of a shopping mall.
My big decision of the day was whether to go off the job early to go play golf or hit the local gin mill. I had two more paint jobs lined up and I was out in the fresh air. I had no boss and no one to impress, no butts to kiss. I had found freedom and I liked it. I still hung on to the notion that one day I would get back to reality, that eventually I should resume wearing a suit and tie and using my brain for more than directing my arm to stroke a paint brush. There was no future in the paint business. I kept interviewing for the only career I thought I knew – retail.
One afternoon, browsing in a bookstore, I happened upon a book titled What Color Is My Parachute?,by Richard Nelson Bolls. With my new life style as a painter, I actually had the time to read again, think, take an inventory of my life and consider what my future could be. I was obviously not a faithful husband, having started to wander soon after my second marriage went south. Jimmy Buffet said it best, It’s my own damn fault, wastin’ away in Margarita-ville.
But I liked being my own boss and in charge of my income. I liked people and I was a born salesman, selling myself (and getting laid) to selling Kirby vacuum cleaners (I had done that part time as a starving married Marine Sergeant with a kid, in Oceanside, California). If you can sell vacuum cleaners, door to door, you can sell anything. Apparently I thrived on rejection! Selling insurance seemed a natural career change for me, since in my view it wasn’t all that much of a change! It served me well. Insurance for me was in fact a life change, and turned out to be a career I loved and was proud of.
I found peace in my life, a career I loved, and put my demons’ behind me. I found love again. I should actually explain I re-fell in love with my childhood sweetheart. We married and had three wonderful years before cancer took her at the age of 43. I suffered a broken heart – both emotionally and physically – with a massive and devastating heart attack on getting the news of her final coma. Just a few months later, although it seems both a moment and an eternity, I had a life-saving heart transplant. My insurance career was at an end. I tried to go back to work and found my new heart had no heart for it.
In my mind, my life was over. I wasn’t too sure about the whole transplant thing. I felt I had lost everything and was just biding time till old man death found me. I was not afraid. My experience had enlightened me; I believed in the wonderful healing power of God, and I believed I had received a second chance at life for some greater purpose. I just couldn’t see what it was, yet.
Dorothea, my current wife, is my “Angel from Iceland”. True to her northland culture, Dora’s attitude is simply, It ain’t over ‘til it’s over. She is kind and compassionate but brooks no sloth and no whining. With her as my partner, we have traveled the world; we are rarely separated. With our several past marriages, we share and enjoy a constantly expanding family of grown children, grandchildren, and now grea-grand children.
I also found another kind of partner with whom I have a life-time synergy, my writing partner, Peggy McCardle. We have co-authored three published books (the first, Change of Heart, is the tale of my heart transplant) and are nearly finished with a fourth, which is almost ready for the editors’ red ink. (This new book will be the second in our action-adventure Red Ink series.)
Nineteen years after marrying me, my Dorothea still works in the airline business instead of retiring, and she still puts up with me. In the autumn of our years, we are content in our little condo by the ocean on the Delmarva Peninsula. I write, and walk the shore. We make occasional trips to visit family in California, nearby Maryland, and Iceland. Life is good!

Comment by R. Maimon on March 23, 2009 at 12:37pm

My first book was about those who dedicate themlseves to the animal welfare cause, but I have recently begun working on an outline for a book dedicated to those individuals caught up in the world of chronic illness and what it takes to "live the life" when the government and the medical society says that we are not "sick enough" to help.
Think this will be an important tool for so many out there who have something to say...

Comment by Neil Willens on February 9, 2009 at 9:43pm

For what it's worth, I was in a funny mood and decided to read Edgar Allan Poe poem Annabel Lee. His work is dark, but I figured, being where I've been in dealing with my own mortality and that of others in different capacities in this lifetime, I wondered how close I could come to taking on the feel of the dark master himself. And so I submit this for some peer feedback; Neil writing as Edgar, with a twist.
Weeping Willow-
When the weeping willow whips around
and creaking eaves screech their eerie sounds,
my haunting memories and fears abound
and my thoughts return to that hallowed ground.

Had I not planted that tree in youth,
misfortune might never have spread its roots,
and in my life, she'd still happily be.
Not six feet beneath my boots.

I recall that dark, foreboding day,
when on my horse she came riding hard...
unaware it panics when those limbs violently sway,
It reared. She fell.
Her graceful neck snapped in the yard.

How aptly named, this willow that weeps.
With drooping boughs it seems forlorn
and it marks, still today, the place she sleeps
and each time I pass it, still I mourn.

Time seems now my enemy.
Each night since, I stir and toss.
Each morning, I whisper words on bended knee
as i visit that lush green bed of moss
that thrives where she lies
beneath her snow white cross.

My question now,
but more a solemn plea...
how much longer must I survive her loss?

****************************
Critique anyone?

Comment by Neil Willens on January 5, 2009 at 6:52pm

Hi,
I have a collection of poetry that I've written while confronting my mortality while awaiting a transplant and supplemented this retrospective works since. This is a "Places the Mind Goes" collection, although this is not the working title.
Neil

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