EasyBlog

In our home, we have adopted a trend that has swept America. Our home is our office. While we both have office space elsewhere, we choose to work from home often. The convenience of being able to open our laptops, participate in strategic phone conversations and conduct business from the comfort of home is in some way liberating.

All of this and we may still be in our pjs. (Don’t try to envision that!)

On this Saturday morning I can’t help but overhear my wife engaged in a phone conference with an organization we both belong to, but as president of the Milwaukee Chapter of the Black Public Relations Society, or “Beepers” as we call it, she deals with the national folks.

How would you feel if one day you wanted to read and there was nothing to read?

Lost, is how I would feel. It would be virtually impossible for that to happen to me in my home because we are surrounded by books. And if there were no books, there are magazines and newspapers and there is always the Internet.

There is no excuse for one not to read, or to have reading material. Reading is far more than fundamental, it is essential if we are to grow and become all we can be.

Lying in bed, unable to sleep, thoughts race through my mind. Those things that keep me awake are probably no different from those things that hundreds of thousands of small business people have contemplated for decades before me.

Second guessing decisions that resulted from many hours of deliberation with others and in your own mind; decisions and conclusions that seemed so hard to come to in the light of day are now so easy in the cool, dark, quiet of night.

For me now, much of it is academic; elementary even.

How could there be a question of the importance of addressing the healthcare needs of Black men? How can those who have resources, overwhelming resources at their disposal be so reluctant to attempt to improve health outcomes for African American men?

I am quite fortunate. I have lived for the past twenty years with a chronic illness. Knowing that there is no cure for the disease known as polymyositis, I've had to rely on a daily regimen of pills and medications that sometimes left me wondering if I would have felt better without them.

Clearly, I needed each one of the medicines at the time they were prescribed, but the side effects of some have left me with permanent scars. But I'm still around to talk about them. I'm also around to do something more important - I'm here to try to shed some light on the whole ordeal of living with a chronic illness - telling you that it isn't as bad as it may seem at the outset. The key, at least with most maladies that will be with you for the duration of your life is to follow your doctor's instructions, take your medications and get your rest.

Those three instructions were given to me very early on by my rheumatologist. I followed them to the letter and while it was difficult at times to obey and conform, I recognized that I had little choice if I was going to survive.