The New Year brought good news, bad news and news; well we
were unsure how to classify some of it.
The Peace Corps informed us that there was no hurry to
complete our medical evaluations because, due to budget problems in Washington
DC, they weren’t going to send any volunteers in the second half of the
year. It would be at least a year before
we would be called to serve so we had some time for my eyes to recover. This also meant that we didn’t have to rush
to put our house on the market in the spring.
Most importantly, I couldn’t see in one eye and that had to
be dealt with. On January 4th
we returned to my ophthalmologist’s office for another biweekly visit; only
this time it was different. The doctor,
with Marilyn watching, had his assistant hold my head against a padded bracket
and proceeded, by hand, to poke a needle into my eye repeatedly. Even though we had discussed the possibility
of my needing this procedure; it was still a little bit of a shock.
By my next visit to the doctor I was seeing better if having
double vision can be called “seeing better”.
We didn’t know it then but my eye was finally on the way to recovery and
it continued to improve throughout the month of January.
At this time we were still evaluating whether to sell our
house or simply rent it out. We were
looking at the possibility of purchasing rental properties and were seriously
considering traveling to Nicaragua to look at investing in a small casita in a
golf course development on the Pacific coast.
A positive aspect to these possibilities was that we would always have a
place to live and a place in which to store some of our remaining stuff. Obviously, we hadn’t quite yet let go of the
little house on the golf course retirement concept and were still planning to
keep some of our “stuff”.
We had been working diligently to convert our banking,
insurance, tax filing, credit cards and other bills to be completely
electronic. Believe it or not; it can be
rather difficult to go completely “paperless” with the insurance and investment
community being the hardest cases. We
looked at the rows of filing cabinets in our garage containing past financial
records, client information, research, writing and 50 years of photographs and
realized that we had an incredibly large scanning and shredding project in
front of us. Thus, began a very long
project that, at times, we were unsure if we would ever finish.
We had been reading periodicals such as International Living, Live and Invest Overseas, and The Overseas Retirement Letter which had sparked our interest in a
variety of places that we might want to visit or even live for a period of
time. Places such as Spain, France,
Italy, Thailand, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Columbia and
Uruguay were touted as having a high quality of life while remaining reasonably
inexpensive. These countries, and
others, reportedly welcomed expats and some even had straightforward visa,
residency, banking, tax and importation regulations for those wishing to live,
invest or retire there. The idea of
traveling extensively after serving in the Peace Corps was starting to take
hold.
By early February I could see 20/15 in my problem eye and it
was time to turn our attention to the other one. The procedure this time would be different
and it was expected that it would take 3 to 6 months for my eye to heal
completely and achieve the best possible vision. The procedure went as expected and once
again, for several weeks, I could only see well through one eye; the other one
now but other than readers, no more glasses!
My golf game was in tatters, I was 15 pounds heavier and in
terrible physical condition and my old back problem was beginning to resurface
after spending 3 months doing nothing but sitting on the couch while I couldn’t
see well enough to do anything. I needed
to get back to work immediately because several of my clients were experiencing
significant difficulties. This meant a
lot of travel and stress.
About this time I had a conversation with my friend and
physical therapist Widd Workman at Diamondback Physical Therapy. Widd had worked with me to rehab my shoulder
after rotator cuff surgery and I had been very pleased with the results. Widd developed program for me to strengthen
my back, legs and core and I started to put my poor old, neglected, out of
shape body back to work.
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