It's the end of an era and the start of a new one.

My back is back

Last week I finally had my back fusion surgery, having injured it 18 months ago! The surgery went well and whilst I am still in a lot of pain and dopey from the medications, I know that the pain I am now feeling is the pain of recovery. That's really positive because I know it will get better every day.

The surgeon said that the operation was pretty straight forward but that I will be in a lot of pain for the first 6 weeks and will be wondering at times why I bothered. It was good to hear that because it helps me deal with it, knowing that what I am going through at the moment is normal.

It's my last day of being employed

It's funny. I was always worried that being off work for so long would mean that I would risk losing my job. If you look at previous blogs, you'll see I had no choice. I had to go through a process of treatments, with surgery being the last resort. On top of that, ACC, our national accident insurance government department refused to pay for my surgery, saying that it was spinal disease degradation.

I ended up in hospital for a week in July and they wanted to send me home on morphine tablets and get an MRI which I needed, to establish the state of my back, as an outpatient. I refused and said I wanted the MRI while I was in hospital as it would take forever. I had been referred to my North Shore District Health Board as 'urgent' by my GP and it ended up taking 4 1/2 months before I was seen. The orthopedic person on the ward was frustrated that I would not follow his instructions and just go home and said they probably wouldn't operate on me anyway because their success rate was only 50%. In the fairly heated discussion, which clearly they were not used to having, with most patients being afraid to talk back to specialists and stand up for their rights. I said that I was worried about losing my job because this had dragged on so long, I was unable to tell my employer when to expect me back. His response was to go behind my back and request that I be seen by a social worker.

Well, my fears were grounded and I have been made redundant. Today is officially my last day at work. They have disestablished my team, and therefore no longer need a manager to lead it. Of course, I'm in recovery so while this is officially my last day, I physically left 2 weeks ago.

New Beginnings

So now I have about 12 weeks of painful recovery, but it is recovery and I am now about to reengage with Wealthy Affiliate and one of the first things I will be doing is applying to become an Amazon Affiliate. I wanted to wait until Google had found my website and I didn't have the distractions of work 2 half days a week, losing my job totally and the stresses of getting approvals from my personal insurer to cover 80% of the cost of my surgery.

So all of that is behind me. I'm putting together a strategy for my website and more websites as well as letting my network know that I will be unemployed from today in case something comes up. I really don't know what I will be doing next. I've not made a cent online yet, so that won't pay my mortgage and for the next few weeks I'm not going to be able to drive or go to any interviews.

I am going to be struggling with ageism, but have a wealth of knowledge and experience. Maybe I'll look at contracting. My last job started as a 2 month contract, this was extended to a year and then became permanent. Maybe I can get lucky and do that again.

My daughter owns a sole charge company which is successfully selling promotional products and clothing such as uniforms, corporate and sports clothing and I could work for myself with her.

The websites are my long term future and I have time over the next few weeks to commit to working hard, but I'm not expecting much from it in the medium term. I am learning a lot and I'm keen to pursue this Affiliate Marketing into multiple directions. First things first though and get the one site working well.

Working with the WA Family

I also know I need to spend a lot more time engaging with you good people because I know that we are in a position to help each other get moving. That is one of the key differentiaters for me. We can all get traffic and show Google that people are interested, by visiting and commenting, maybe even buying from each other's sites. Google doesn't know that the traffic is generated through this system. It doesn't need to know either. Business is business.

So if you have followed me and I've not followed you back yet, my apologies, but I have been very distracted. That changes from now and I have some catch up to do.

Thanks for your support and interest. I look forward to sharing the same with you, now that I am officially unemployed, well I will be in roughly 5 hours:)