Hello, my name is Howard and I would like to take you on a short journey, the journey of my life, like so many other lives one filled with many joys, many sorrows, many struggles and many triumphs. I share my story with you for no other reason than to help inspire those that may feel like there is no escape from the pains that can affect our lives in so many ways. I am no more different than any other person in this world and I hope that once you read my story you will see the true power of the human mind and the strength that can be gained purely through your dominant thoughts.
I was born into a family that was broken from the start but that does not mean that I was not surrounded with love. One thing I have learned throughout life is that a person that does not value their life will lack the strength and perseverance to claim their right to happiness, love and success. I had two parents that were loving, caring individuals yet one had incredible strength while the other had none, one valued their life yet the other did not. As I look back upon my life I can see that my Mother persevered through the power of positive thinking, even though she may not have realized it at the time I can see that it was her faith, her belief and her determination that held our broken family together to the best of her ability.
My Mother held our family together but my father was weak, he did not value his life, he did not utilize his own personal power and he chose not to fight his demons and for that reason and that reason alone he was not a part of our family. My Father was an alcoholic, not your average alcoholic he was as severe an alcoholic as I have ever known throughout my entire life. I could not give you a number for the times that he broke my heart and the hearts of my siblings.
However hard I tried not to let him define my childhood it was a battle I could not win. I carried around this mass of pain inside me which manifested into anger and before I learned of the power of positive thinking I allowed that anger to dictate my life in many ways. I myself began to drink at an early age and although I graduated high school as one of the top ten students out of a class of over 300 I was an all out alcoholic and I had been one all throughout my high school years.
My alcoholism and my anger did not make for a good match. I had bad judgment which led to bad decisions and at the age of 18 I became a father and soon after a husband. It was at this point in my life when the strength passed on by my Mother kicked in and I made an immediate decision to stop following my father's footprints. I knew that deep down inside me I had the strength to rule my own life rather than allow it to be ruled and fueled by alcohol and anger and as I reflect upon it now it is clear to me that this was the power of positive thinking in action. I knew that the odds were stacked against me at this point, being just 18 with a baby and a wife to support, my dreams of college were all but gone. But I was never one to quit and when things got tough I got tougher or so I thought. I did maintain an attitude of positive thinking because I knew that I would build a successful life for myself and my family.
I was born into a family that was broken from the start but that does not mean that I was not surrounded with love. One thing I have learned throughout life is that a person that does not value their life will lack the strength and perseverance to claim their right to happiness, love and success. I had two parents that were loving, caring individuals yet one had incredible strength while the other had none, one valued their life yet the other did not. As I look back upon my life I can see that my Mother persevered through the power of positive thinking, even though she may not have realized it at the time I can see that it was her faith, her belief and her determination that held our broken family together to the best of her ability.
My Mother held our family together but my father was weak, he did not value his life, he did not utilize his own personal power and he chose not to fight his demons and for that reason and that reason alone he was not a part of our family. My Father was an alcoholic, not your average alcoholic he was as severe an alcoholic as I have ever known throughout my entire life. I could not give you a number for the times that he broke my heart and the hearts of my siblings.
However hard I tried not to let him define my childhood it was a battle I could not win. I carried around this mass of pain inside me which manifested into anger and before I learned of the power of positive thinking I allowed that anger to dictate my life in many ways. I myself began to drink at an early age and although I graduated high school as one of the top ten students out of a class of over 300 I was an all out alcoholic and I had been one all throughout my high school years.
My alcoholism and my anger did not make for a good match. I had bad judgment which led to bad decisions and at the age of 18 I became a father and soon after a husband. It was at this point in my life when the strength passed on by my Mother kicked in and I made an immediate decision to stop following my father's footprints. I knew that deep down inside me I had the strength to rule my own life rather than allow it to be ruled and fueled by alcohol and anger and as I reflect upon it now it is clear to me that this was the power of positive thinking in action. I knew that the odds were stacked against me at this point, being just 18 with a baby and a wife to support, my dreams of college were all but gone. But I was never one to quit and when things got tough I got tougher or so I thought. I did maintain an attitude of positive thinking because I knew that I would build a successful life for myself and my family.
I immediately got a job and I purchased a home for $12,500 which you could say was a “fixer-up” at best and regardless of what anyone else thought I knew that I could turn it into a beautiful home. I always believed in myself and my capabilities, some may call it arrogance but when dreams become reality that is the power of positive thinking in action. You see, I did not have dreams, I had goals and I had strength of character and I believed in myself because I knew if I did not no one else would. The job I had only paid minimum wage but I was very crafty in my attempt to land a job at the highest paying company in the area and my perseverance and craftiness paid off, I got the job. Everything was working for me and I was proud as you can be, I loved my wife and I could not get enough of my son and our “fixer-upper” was turning into a beautiful home, just as I had envisioned.
However, just when I thought things could get any better the floor fell out from under me. I had been working 12 to 16 hour days along with remodeling my home completely and it all caught up to me and I ended up with the flu. I left work early that day only to come home to something that was so painful it brought out the worst of me. I had not escaped all the anger and resentment that I held towards my father I just merely buried deep inside of me. That day when I had left work early due to being sick I walked into my home and found my wife downstairs in bed with another guy all the while my 4 month old son was upstairs crying and he had been for some time.
At that moment I forgot about the person I had wanted to be and I allowed my anger and immaturity to take over. I dragged the guy out of my house and I am not proud to tell you this but I beat him until I thought that I had killed him. I then called for my sister to come take my son and I then called the police and waited outside for them knowing full well that I was headed to jail. By the grace of God the man I beat survived and I remained in jail for for just a short while. While in jail I had time to think, I had to figure out how to get past the pain and do what was best for my son. I had always been one that had to have everything figured out in my mind in such a way that I had total control no matter what the circumstances. I hadn't realized at that point but often times throughout my young life I used the power of positive thinking to help me gain control of any problems that I had faced back then.
I will not bore you by rehashing every step of my life but I do want to show you how maintaining a positive attitude can and will help you to deal with any challenge you may face in your life so I ask that you keep reading because what I have to share with you may just save your life one day. First you should know that I choose to fight for custody of my son and although I was only 19 at the time I sold everything I had to pay for a two year battle in court which ultimately gave me full custody of my son. The day the court awarded me with custody was the last day that we ever saw my son's biological mother. As I am updating this it is now August 21,2010 and my son is now a 26 year old man. He went his entire childhood never once seeing his biological mother, not a phone call, not a birthday card, Nothing! That is until he received a phone call just 2 months ago which he choose not to return.
OK I promised you a shortened version of the less important events so here is a quick rundown from the age of 19 to 35, the age I was when I had nothing to hold onto except for the power of positive thinking. When my son was 5 years old I married the most wonderful person in the world and I am proud to say we celebrated our 22nd anniversary on May 6th of 2010. After having worked for the same company for 8 ½ years I decided to start my own business as a Wholesale Florist it was called Express Flowers. Everyone I knew told me I was crazy to give up a job as good as the one I had and very few if any thought that I could build this business but I had the power of positive thinking on my side and as it turned out the business was a success. By my 5th year in business I was grossing over $2.5 million per year and all the while I had enjoyed a very successful boxing career and I had started a small gym where I worked as a personal trainer and I had also trained some young boxers. Everything was about as good as it could get, my family and I were happy and successful.
Then it hit, at the age of 35 I began to experience severe headaches, the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I knew that something was seriously wrong so without telling my wife I visited my doctor and I was eventually given an MRI which showed that I had a brain tumor and the situation was serious, very serious. It was at this point that I made a decision that I will regret for the rest of my life. I choose not to tell my wife or family. I was initially told that the tumor was inoperable and that I had 12 months to live at best. My Mother who had work her entire life at a job she hated but she stayed at because she wanted to give her kids the best life possible had just recently retired and she deserved to enjoy as much of her retirement as possible. I knew that if I had told her she would have been heartbroken and I could not do that to her or the rest of my family.
It wasn't as though I was giving up because I believed in the power of positive thinking and I was not throwing away all my belief’s, I was not ready to give up but I had to be realistic at the same time and do what I thought was the right thing for my family. I met with my business attorney and he helped me get as they say “all my affairs in order.” I wrote goodbye letters to all those I loved and I left them with my attorney to mail out after my passing. At this point I was feeling pretty alone and rather scared but I could not tell my wife and watch her go through months of heartache and pain, I wanted her just as she was. It was at this point when I really became focused on fighting this tumor. I had been through hard times in my life and I had made it through all of those and I had to believe I had the strength to make it through this.
As hard as it would get at times I still believed in the power of positive thinking and that is exactly what I focused on, keeping and maintaining a positive mental attitude. I am going to cut this short for those of you who are still with me at this point. After seeking opinion after opinion I finally found a doctor that would would try to remove the tumor. I had told my wife I had to go to Canada on a business trip but I was actually having brain surgery in hopes of saving my life. I survived the surgery but I now had to break the news to my wife and family because there was no hiding a shaved head and a fresh new scar.
Unfortunately my medical problems did not end there. It was not soon after the surgery when my symptoms returned and to make a long story short I ended up undergoing six more brain surgeries to have multiple tumors removed and although my prognosis was never very promising I had never lost my faith in the power of positive thinking and I credit that for me being here today to share my story with you. Now I am sure that you probably thought that the story ended there but unfortunately it does not. I for obvious reasons could not effectively run my business by myself but I had entrusted my best friend of 35 years to help me out through all this and I had no doubt that he could handle it as he had been working with me from the start and I had paid him well. I was able to handle the business end of things from my hospital for the most part but following my last surgery I developed a severe seizure disorder as a result of the damage that was caused to my brain. The seizures were so severe and so violent that I would injure myself, during one of the seizures I had broken my leg in three places.
It got so bad that I was having 3 or more seizures a week and was in the hospital more than I was at home. The seizures carried on for a couple of years before they finally found a medication that would control them to a point. After five long years of battling my medical issues my friend, my Best Friend from age 10 on just out of the blue decided to quit working for me. Needless to say I was shocked because for the past 15 years he earned more money than he could from any other job with his skills and when I really needed him he just decided to walk away. This was a major blow to me and honestly it was as painful as any of the surgeries I had undergone. Soon after he had left the business I had discovered that my $100,000 line of credit had been used in full and I had suppliers that by my records were shown to have been paid each month calling daily for money I did not have. As I am sure you can figure out they had not been paid and my checking account and the additional $100,000 was gone. Was it a mystery? No by my account but for legal reasons that is as much as I will say.
Now here I am still fighting my disorder and and now having to face the reality of losing my business that I had worked so hard to build. Once again I had to remain optimistic and really believe in the power of positive thinking and as a result of my strong belief I was able to restructure my business completely and soon after it was once again a thriving business. I realize the story I am sharing with you might sound a bit exaggerated but if anything there are many harsh details that I have left out and you would think that at this point I had made it through the worst of things but once again there were more challenges ahead for me and my family to face.
Today being August 21,2010 it was about 4 years ago when I began to experience difficulty with my breathing. I ended up in the emergency room at least a dozen times because I just could not get enough air and on two occasions I had stopped breathing altogether and the ambulance crew had revived me. Once again I visited doctor after doctor and at one point one of the physicians thought that he could cure my symptoms by injecting botox into my throat near my vocal cords and I was very optimistic about this treatment. The doctor was to perform the treatment in his office and while he was injecting me with the botox he accidentally broke the 18 gauge needle off in my neck which result in an emergency surgery as the needle was penetrating my vocal cords.
Once I awoke from the surgery 6 hours later as a result of the incident I had lost my ability to speak. Losing the ability to speak may not sound that traumatic but I can reassure you that it is something that I would not wish upon anyone. To make matters worse the treatment did not resolve my breathing issue and it had progressed to the point that I had to have a tracheotomy. I am not going to sit here and tell you that the power of positive thinking actually kept me from becoming discouraged because at this point I was mentally and physically beaten down. I went through a period of depression and I began to feel sorry for myself and there were times when I felt like just giving up. What I described to you in the above paragraph is what gave me the desire to share my story. I eventually came to my senses and I through myself into the study of personal development unlike I ever had in the past. I refused to give up on my beliefs, it was my positive attitude that helped me to get through everything and when I looked back upon everything I had been to at that point I knew that it was my faith in the overwhelming power of positive thinking that allowed me to survive even when the doctors told me I would not.
I apologize my friends but this story is not over. I was still having seizures from time to time and I now had a hole in my neck which allowed me to breathe and I could not talk above a slight whisper so it had become all to clear to me that I had to sell my business, aside from my family it was the one thing I had left that gave me a real sense of pride so making that decision hit me hard but I knew it had to be done. Well a very good friend of my older brother as well as a man that I had immense respect for approached me with an interest to purchase my business before I had even had the chance to put it on the market. I was blown away and I mean just blown away. Here I am having battled through some of the worst experiences and having just recently re-committed myself to all I had learned through my years of studying personal development and the power of the human mind, at a point to where I had no other option but to sell my business.
I hadn't had the time to get past the thought of how difficult it was going to be to sell my business as fast as I needed to when out of nowhere this person who I considered to be like a mentor to me when I was younger contacts me asking if I would be willing to sell my business to him. If this could not restore my faith in the power of positive thinking nothing could. Although I was extremely grateful to be able to sell the business it was very hard to accept the price he was willing to pay. Not less than three years earlier I had an offer from a supplier to buy my business for $1.2 million and because I had no other options I had to accept slightly under $600,000 knowing that it was worth at least twice that.
You would think that once I closed on the business I would be able to focus on my health but right in line with all the other challenges in my life 7 months after selling the business in which I was holding the mortgage the new owners, a man I trusted with basically with my financial future, without any warning, just straight out tells me he is shutting the business down and he would not be making anymore mortgage payments. This was a huge blow to me and my family. You see I left out the part where my medical insurance company found a loophole in my policy stating that they did not have to pay for any type of medical trial not yet fully approved by the FDA which left my wife and I with astronomical medical bills. I had sold everything we had to pay off the bills avoiding bankruptcy but in the end we were left with nothing but our house a car and my business.
With me holding the mortgage on the business we knew that we do alright because we had the monthly payments but when the man I so highly respected hit me with that news I was devastated and there was no chance of reviving the business for a number of reasons, for one my health was still deteriorating and second he literally buried the business. He refused to follow my advice no matter what I said or my long term employees and he changed all the suppliers and eventually alienated most of the long time customers. If ever there was a time that I had to remain strong in my belief in the power of positive thinking this was the time. I was scared, I had no job and I just basically gave my business away and my retirement, I felt like I had let my family down in the worst way. This was hard!
If you are facing a hard time in your life just take a moment and tell yourself you are not giving up and you are not giving in! Again I apologize but my story is not quite finished, it is now July, 2008 and I now have to foreclose on a business that has been destroyed. I am broke yet I must come up with a few thousand to retain an attorney. My attorney tells me that this could go on for a year of more, I am tired! I begin to have trouble eating, it gets so bad that I am aspirating my food resulting in multiple cases of pneumonia and numerous hospital stays. I laid in a hospital bed an hour and a half drive from my home for 27 days. My fever would shoot so high that I would have to be iced down nightly. I missed my wife, I missed being home, I was worried about money and I was tired, mentally, physically tired.
I thought about giving up, I thought about throwing in the towel because I just did not think I could take it any longer but then I thought about my family, I thought about my wife and how much I loved her, I thought about all those other times I could have given up but I did not. I realized that if I gave up now all those other battles all the faith I had in the power of positive thinking all the examples I had set for others, it would have all been for nothing and I could not let all that be for nothing. When I was released from that hospital after 27 days I decided to make everything I had been through count for something. As many of my readers know first hand I have been here to help anyone who needed it and anyone who asked and there is not a day that goes by that I don't have an email asking for some help and I do the best that I can.
Those that contact me know how strongly I feel about the amazing power of positive thinking and many have told me that they have turned their lives around completely based on this act alone. As many of you know I am still fighting my disability. Just about a year ago I developed these horrible, painful uncontrollable head movements. The doctors tell me that is a neurological disorder that they have no treatment for. I am trapped in my home, I cannot drive it is too painful to go out for any length of time, I was just fitted for a stabilizing brace just two months ago, that would be April of 2010.
Whatever it is that is breaking down my respiratory system has now caused me to lose my ability to swallow so the temporary feeding tube they put in me back in May of this year 2010 was just replaced with a permanent one. I am 45 years old now and I will never eat or drink anything by mouth again for the rest of my life. I have cases of liquid nutrition delivered once a month and I inject my liquid meals through a tube directly into my stomach. As I write this my family is in the other room eating tenderloin steaks, crab legs and an assortment of other foods in celebration of my in-laws 45th anniversary. Two weeks ago my wife and I flew to NY City so I could be seen by one of the top neurologists in the world and he told me that I was not a candidate for a new surgery he pioneered that might have made it possible for me to have the trach removed possibly allowing me to eat food by mouth once again.
This was another really big let down for me but I am not giving up, I am not giving in, I am not going to stop fighting and I will never stop believing in the Power of Positive Thinking!
However, just when I thought things could get any better the floor fell out from under me. I had been working 12 to 16 hour days along with remodeling my home completely and it all caught up to me and I ended up with the flu. I left work early that day only to come home to something that was so painful it brought out the worst of me. I had not escaped all the anger and resentment that I held towards my father I just merely buried deep inside of me. That day when I had left work early due to being sick I walked into my home and found my wife downstairs in bed with another guy all the while my 4 month old son was upstairs crying and he had been for some time.
At that moment I forgot about the person I had wanted to be and I allowed my anger and immaturity to take over. I dragged the guy out of my house and I am not proud to tell you this but I beat him until I thought that I had killed him. I then called for my sister to come take my son and I then called the police and waited outside for them knowing full well that I was headed to jail. By the grace of God the man I beat survived and I remained in jail for for just a short while. While in jail I had time to think, I had to figure out how to get past the pain and do what was best for my son. I had always been one that had to have everything figured out in my mind in such a way that I had total control no matter what the circumstances. I hadn't realized at that point but often times throughout my young life I used the power of positive thinking to help me gain control of any problems that I had faced back then.
I will not bore you by rehashing every step of my life but I do want to show you how maintaining a positive attitude can and will help you to deal with any challenge you may face in your life so I ask that you keep reading because what I have to share with you may just save your life one day. First you should know that I choose to fight for custody of my son and although I was only 19 at the time I sold everything I had to pay for a two year battle in court which ultimately gave me full custody of my son. The day the court awarded me with custody was the last day that we ever saw my son's biological mother. As I am updating this it is now August 21,2010 and my son is now a 26 year old man. He went his entire childhood never once seeing his biological mother, not a phone call, not a birthday card, Nothing! That is until he received a phone call just 2 months ago which he choose not to return.
OK I promised you a shortened version of the less important events so here is a quick rundown from the age of 19 to 35, the age I was when I had nothing to hold onto except for the power of positive thinking. When my son was 5 years old I married the most wonderful person in the world and I am proud to say we celebrated our 22nd anniversary on May 6th of 2010. After having worked for the same company for 8 ½ years I decided to start my own business as a Wholesale Florist it was called Express Flowers. Everyone I knew told me I was crazy to give up a job as good as the one I had and very few if any thought that I could build this business but I had the power of positive thinking on my side and as it turned out the business was a success. By my 5th year in business I was grossing over $2.5 million per year and all the while I had enjoyed a very successful boxing career and I had started a small gym where I worked as a personal trainer and I had also trained some young boxers. Everything was about as good as it could get, my family and I were happy and successful.
Then it hit, at the age of 35 I began to experience severe headaches, the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I knew that something was seriously wrong so without telling my wife I visited my doctor and I was eventually given an MRI which showed that I had a brain tumor and the situation was serious, very serious. It was at this point that I made a decision that I will regret for the rest of my life. I choose not to tell my wife or family. I was initially told that the tumor was inoperable and that I had 12 months to live at best. My Mother who had work her entire life at a job she hated but she stayed at because she wanted to give her kids the best life possible had just recently retired and she deserved to enjoy as much of her retirement as possible. I knew that if I had told her she would have been heartbroken and I could not do that to her or the rest of my family.
It wasn't as though I was giving up because I believed in the power of positive thinking and I was not throwing away all my belief’s, I was not ready to give up but I had to be realistic at the same time and do what I thought was the right thing for my family. I met with my business attorney and he helped me get as they say “all my affairs in order.” I wrote goodbye letters to all those I loved and I left them with my attorney to mail out after my passing. At this point I was feeling pretty alone and rather scared but I could not tell my wife and watch her go through months of heartache and pain, I wanted her just as she was. It was at this point when I really became focused on fighting this tumor. I had been through hard times in my life and I had made it through all of those and I had to believe I had the strength to make it through this.
As hard as it would get at times I still believed in the power of positive thinking and that is exactly what I focused on, keeping and maintaining a positive mental attitude. I am going to cut this short for those of you who are still with me at this point. After seeking opinion after opinion I finally found a doctor that would would try to remove the tumor. I had told my wife I had to go to Canada on a business trip but I was actually having brain surgery in hopes of saving my life. I survived the surgery but I now had to break the news to my wife and family because there was no hiding a shaved head and a fresh new scar.
Unfortunately my medical problems did not end there. It was not soon after the surgery when my symptoms returned and to make a long story short I ended up undergoing six more brain surgeries to have multiple tumors removed and although my prognosis was never very promising I had never lost my faith in the power of positive thinking and I credit that for me being here today to share my story with you. Now I am sure that you probably thought that the story ended there but unfortunately it does not. I for obvious reasons could not effectively run my business by myself but I had entrusted my best friend of 35 years to help me out through all this and I had no doubt that he could handle it as he had been working with me from the start and I had paid him well. I was able to handle the business end of things from my hospital for the most part but following my last surgery I developed a severe seizure disorder as a result of the damage that was caused to my brain. The seizures were so severe and so violent that I would injure myself, during one of the seizures I had broken my leg in three places.
It got so bad that I was having 3 or more seizures a week and was in the hospital more than I was at home. The seizures carried on for a couple of years before they finally found a medication that would control them to a point. After five long years of battling my medical issues my friend, my Best Friend from age 10 on just out of the blue decided to quit working for me. Needless to say I was shocked because for the past 15 years he earned more money than he could from any other job with his skills and when I really needed him he just decided to walk away. This was a major blow to me and honestly it was as painful as any of the surgeries I had undergone. Soon after he had left the business I had discovered that my $100,000 line of credit had been used in full and I had suppliers that by my records were shown to have been paid each month calling daily for money I did not have. As I am sure you can figure out they had not been paid and my checking account and the additional $100,000 was gone. Was it a mystery? No by my account but for legal reasons that is as much as I will say.
Now here I am still fighting my disorder and and now having to face the reality of losing my business that I had worked so hard to build. Once again I had to remain optimistic and really believe in the power of positive thinking and as a result of my strong belief I was able to restructure my business completely and soon after it was once again a thriving business. I realize the story I am sharing with you might sound a bit exaggerated but if anything there are many harsh details that I have left out and you would think that at this point I had made it through the worst of things but once again there were more challenges ahead for me and my family to face.
Today being August 21,2010 it was about 4 years ago when I began to experience difficulty with my breathing. I ended up in the emergency room at least a dozen times because I just could not get enough air and on two occasions I had stopped breathing altogether and the ambulance crew had revived me. Once again I visited doctor after doctor and at one point one of the physicians thought that he could cure my symptoms by injecting botox into my throat near my vocal cords and I was very optimistic about this treatment. The doctor was to perform the treatment in his office and while he was injecting me with the botox he accidentally broke the 18 gauge needle off in my neck which result in an emergency surgery as the needle was penetrating my vocal cords.
Once I awoke from the surgery 6 hours later as a result of the incident I had lost my ability to speak. Losing the ability to speak may not sound that traumatic but I can reassure you that it is something that I would not wish upon anyone. To make matters worse the treatment did not resolve my breathing issue and it had progressed to the point that I had to have a tracheotomy. I am not going to sit here and tell you that the power of positive thinking actually kept me from becoming discouraged because at this point I was mentally and physically beaten down. I went through a period of depression and I began to feel sorry for myself and there were times when I felt like just giving up. What I described to you in the above paragraph is what gave me the desire to share my story. I eventually came to my senses and I through myself into the study of personal development unlike I ever had in the past. I refused to give up on my beliefs, it was my positive attitude that helped me to get through everything and when I looked back upon everything I had been to at that point I knew that it was my faith in the overwhelming power of positive thinking that allowed me to survive even when the doctors told me I would not.
I apologize my friends but this story is not over. I was still having seizures from time to time and I now had a hole in my neck which allowed me to breathe and I could not talk above a slight whisper so it had become all to clear to me that I had to sell my business, aside from my family it was the one thing I had left that gave me a real sense of pride so making that decision hit me hard but I knew it had to be done. Well a very good friend of my older brother as well as a man that I had immense respect for approached me with an interest to purchase my business before I had even had the chance to put it on the market. I was blown away and I mean just blown away. Here I am having battled through some of the worst experiences and having just recently re-committed myself to all I had learned through my years of studying personal development and the power of the human mind, at a point to where I had no other option but to sell my business.
I hadn't had the time to get past the thought of how difficult it was going to be to sell my business as fast as I needed to when out of nowhere this person who I considered to be like a mentor to me when I was younger contacts me asking if I would be willing to sell my business to him. If this could not restore my faith in the power of positive thinking nothing could. Although I was extremely grateful to be able to sell the business it was very hard to accept the price he was willing to pay. Not less than three years earlier I had an offer from a supplier to buy my business for $1.2 million and because I had no other options I had to accept slightly under $600,000 knowing that it was worth at least twice that.
You would think that once I closed on the business I would be able to focus on my health but right in line with all the other challenges in my life 7 months after selling the business in which I was holding the mortgage the new owners, a man I trusted with basically with my financial future, without any warning, just straight out tells me he is shutting the business down and he would not be making anymore mortgage payments. This was a huge blow to me and my family. You see I left out the part where my medical insurance company found a loophole in my policy stating that they did not have to pay for any type of medical trial not yet fully approved by the FDA which left my wife and I with astronomical medical bills. I had sold everything we had to pay off the bills avoiding bankruptcy but in the end we were left with nothing but our house a car and my business.
With me holding the mortgage on the business we knew that we do alright because we had the monthly payments but when the man I so highly respected hit me with that news I was devastated and there was no chance of reviving the business for a number of reasons, for one my health was still deteriorating and second he literally buried the business. He refused to follow my advice no matter what I said or my long term employees and he changed all the suppliers and eventually alienated most of the long time customers. If ever there was a time that I had to remain strong in my belief in the power of positive thinking this was the time. I was scared, I had no job and I just basically gave my business away and my retirement, I felt like I had let my family down in the worst way. This was hard!
If you are facing a hard time in your life just take a moment and tell yourself you are not giving up and you are not giving in! Again I apologize but my story is not quite finished, it is now July, 2008 and I now have to foreclose on a business that has been destroyed. I am broke yet I must come up with a few thousand to retain an attorney. My attorney tells me that this could go on for a year of more, I am tired! I begin to have trouble eating, it gets so bad that I am aspirating my food resulting in multiple cases of pneumonia and numerous hospital stays. I laid in a hospital bed an hour and a half drive from my home for 27 days. My fever would shoot so high that I would have to be iced down nightly. I missed my wife, I missed being home, I was worried about money and I was tired, mentally, physically tired.
I thought about giving up, I thought about throwing in the towel because I just did not think I could take it any longer but then I thought about my family, I thought about my wife and how much I loved her, I thought about all those other times I could have given up but I did not. I realized that if I gave up now all those other battles all the faith I had in the power of positive thinking all the examples I had set for others, it would have all been for nothing and I could not let all that be for nothing. When I was released from that hospital after 27 days I decided to make everything I had been through count for something. As many of my readers know first hand I have been here to help anyone who needed it and anyone who asked and there is not a day that goes by that I don't have an email asking for some help and I do the best that I can.
Those that contact me know how strongly I feel about the amazing power of positive thinking and many have told me that they have turned their lives around completely based on this act alone. As many of you know I am still fighting my disability. Just about a year ago I developed these horrible, painful uncontrollable head movements. The doctors tell me that is a neurological disorder that they have no treatment for. I am trapped in my home, I cannot drive it is too painful to go out for any length of time, I was just fitted for a stabilizing brace just two months ago, that would be April of 2010.
Whatever it is that is breaking down my respiratory system has now caused me to lose my ability to swallow so the temporary feeding tube they put in me back in May of this year 2010 was just replaced with a permanent one. I am 45 years old now and I will never eat or drink anything by mouth again for the rest of my life. I have cases of liquid nutrition delivered once a month and I inject my liquid meals through a tube directly into my stomach. As I write this my family is in the other room eating tenderloin steaks, crab legs and an assortment of other foods in celebration of my in-laws 45th anniversary. Two weeks ago my wife and I flew to NY City so I could be seen by one of the top neurologists in the world and he told me that I was not a candidate for a new surgery he pioneered that might have made it possible for me to have the trach removed possibly allowing me to eat food by mouth once again.
This was another really big let down for me but I am not giving up, I am not giving in, I am not going to stop fighting and I will never stop believing in the Power of Positive Thinking!
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