Illuminating Featured Writers

Still alive and well, and inspirationally writing all about it.

About a year ago today this publication called Illumination did not exist. Donald Trump had just been acquitted at the end of his first impeachment and the Japanese Olympics were postponed due to the news of a global pandemic called Covid 19. These two topics were to dominate the news for the rest of the year.

Sadly, to date, over two and a half million people have died as a result of Covid 19, and Donald Trump has escaped yet another impeachment
which was the result of inciting an insurrection. All of that being said, Trump did lose the Presidency and a global programme of Covid vaccination is well underway. Every cloud has a silver lining one way or another.

Zooming in on another event which was to have global ramifications of a sort, it was about a year ago that, somewhere in the antipodes, a very visionary person, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, was quietly setting about the launch a new publication on Medium. Meanwhile, in a sunny little corner of Europe.....

In March 2020, I was living and working in the south of Spain and knocking at death's door, without fully realising it, a silent heart attack and a mini stroke, to name but two of my life threatening illnesses. These were quite possibly caused by sleep apnea. Tests revealed that during one hour of sleep I stopped breathing 48 times! That is almost once every minute. Shock and horror just about covers my reaction to this appalling news.

The full extent of my health issues would only become clear after I moved to Japan to get the correct treatment I was being denied in Spain. It turned out that I also had PMR and GCA. Try to imagine what it must feel like to be hit by a forty ton truck and you'll get the idea of how painful those two conditions are. I have to say that I only mention these things to put them into some sort of context and for no other reason.

Once installed in Japan, not too far from Tokyo, I set about trying to deal with my health problems and at the same time I began to look for online work possibilities. By chance I came across Medium (I saw it mentioned on Linkedin and decided to investigate). The rest is history as they say.

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