Alan Kosinski's Blog

The last three days…
Right now the time is 5:52am on March 20, 2011. The significance to you is probably nothing. But to me, I have been lead to share my last 3 days with you. It’s a personal glance into part of my life, that has brought me to this date and time with the ability and wherewithal to share.
Thursday, March 17th I awakened from a restless sleep about 6:20am. This restlessness is very unusual for me since I normally sleep on about 4 hours, or occasionally 6. Instead of getting up to a “bright sun shiny day” I was in pain. My entire body felt as if it was hit by a truck. It’s a horrible way to start St. Patrick’s Day. My motor skills were not normal. I simply wrote off the cause of the pain to a “longer than normal dog walk” the night before. Being home for about a week was relaxing to a point, and some work was also accomplished. A lot of time was watching the television, which is not a normal occurrence. Basically I was lazy for a week. No exercise, eating maybe too good, lounging around instead of being active, and generally sitting on my butt. I started coffee in the kitchen of our Cape Cod home, but almost before I could push the “on button” sharp intense pain shot through my back and left side. It was excruciating! I couldn’t walk, couldn’t move, and was frozen with pain. My cries and loud groans woke my wife Becky. She helped me back to bed and lovingly massaged the afflicted area. I stayed in bed in major pain for about 3 hours.
I have a very unusual lifestyle which includes not taking drugs of any kind including aspirin, but Becky supplied Motrin or something which I gladly took. It didn’t help. Also, you should know that I can endure high levels of pain where others would be crippled. About 6 years ago I smashed my knee cap about 7am one morning. I then realized why mobsters always shot peoples knees. That was pain! But even so, I had the hospital splint my knee, and was out within a couple hours, not taking any pain medication until about 11:00 that night, only because I couldn’t sleep from the pain. The experience I was having last Thursday morning was on the same level as the smashed knee, but in a more general area comprising of my whole left side as opposed to a concentrated knee cap. All I can say it that it was painful.
I justified the condition of being caused by the long walk the night before. I felt that I couldn’t get tied down today. I was going “off Cape” for the next week, and planned to celebrate by cooking the traditional “Corned Beef & Cabbage”, and sharing it with my Advisory Board of Ultimate Real Estate Investors Association during a Board meeting that evening at my Easton, MA home office. My wife helped me pack up the car, and after much stalling, still in pain, I headed to my destination just over an hour away. I was NOT a pleasant person and was extremely upset that I couldn’t find my IPOD. I wanted to listen to an educational seminar on the ride to keep my mind occupied with something other than the pain.
Maggie, (our Airedale Terrier dog) and I drove off. By the time we arrived at the office I was feeling a little better. My Easton office is located in a fairly large six bedroom, four bath house with a three car garage, in a newer upper class neighborhood. I backed into the middle garage bay and unloaded the car. I set up my personal computer and started my phone calls, email responses, and the like.
I was in a painful fog. The time required cooking a corned beef & cabbage is from three to five hours. Since I was at home on the Cape last week when daylight savings time was changed, and being in my “fog”, the clock on the stove was not changed. I found that most of the day I was ‘time confused’ due to the pain, but didn’t realize the time difference from the “real world” and my stove. Let me suffice to say that the meal was started over an hour later than it should have been.
In the confusion of packing from home, some things were forgotten, such as the carrots for the meal. Also I had no ‘dipping bread’. I took the dog for the ½ mile ride to the local grocery store and got what I needed. Upon returning to my ‘office’ one of my partners had arrived. I caught Jonathan up on my day. We worked back and forth for most of the afternoon while the meal was cooking. At 6pm, the time for the meeting, he let it be known that I have been a whiny, crying, pain in the neck all day. He did follow that with “I have never seen Alan this way before in the seven years we have known each other.” We had a great productive meeting, albeit painful for me, eating about 8pm. Throughout the day I took two more ibuprofen tablets for the pain.
Jonathan and I continued to work into the night and he decided to stay. Still in major pain I took some more ibuprofen tablets and went to bed. I had major trouble sleeping, waking several times through the night. Finally about 4am I made an Earl Grey tea with lemon and ginger, grabbed a book, took two more ibuprofen, and read for an hour or so. I followed with bed again, and finally got up about 8am. I felt a little better than the previous day, but I was very tired. I started cooking some steel cut oats for breakfast, fed the dog, and went to the back yard to enjoy the sunlight and warm day. Jonathan jumped right back into work and I took it a little easy for the rest of the morning. When I say I took it easy, what I really mean is that over the course of four hours, I did more productive work than most people would do in two to three days at their job. Jonathan quadrupled my output.
Mid afternoon I got a frantic call from one of my sisters asking if I was in the area and could take my Mom to the doctor’s office. Mom has altimeters and lives in an assisted living facility in Stoughton, the next town over, that we grew up in as kids. Mom was on new medications and was not doing well. I picked her up and spent the afternoon with her going to doctors office, blood lab, grabbed Wendy’s fast food (very unhealthy), then dropped her off at about 5 pm. Please understand that I was in major pain most of the morning, had a few more Ibuprofen about noon, and spent all afternoon in major pain with no medication. I was a hurting puppy by the time I dropped Mom off.
I had a 5pm appointment that I pushed off until 6pm. I was approving furniture that someone was donating to Scholar House Communities, a sober housing organization that provides transitional housing to alcohol and drug attics who are in recovery. It’s a great organization that helps a lot of people. And yes, in full disclosure, I am the founder of it. Anyway, back to the story…still in major pain, I drove over and spent an hour arranging what and when we will have someone pick up the furniture. The guy who was offering the furniture has supplied five good leads for my real estate investment business over the last 6 months, and we are buying 3 of them, so our conversation was very productive and covered both the furniture and follow up on the leads.
I left there about 7pm and spoke to my wife Becky who had driven up to spend the weekend with me and arrived in Easton about 4pm. I told her I was very sick, in pain, and was heading ‘home’ to meet her. I made a call to one of my property managers that I was supposed to meet earlier in the afternoon, but being tied up with Mom, we agreed to meet at 7pm. I told him that I was sick and would catch up on Monday.
Upon arriving in Easton, I walked in, hit the bathroom and grabbed a couple more Ibuprofen and laid down. They didn’t work. An hour later I had another. Nothing. An hour later I took two more. No worky. Pain was super crazy, and about 10:30 my wife took me to the hospital. The prognosis was a kidney stone. As I mentioned I don’t do drugs, not even aspirin, but since getting to the hospital I was begging for anything for the pain. About 12;20am, I finally received an IV with a morphine drip. A half hour later the pain had finally subsided and it was CATSCAN time. The movement of getting out of the gurney, onto the SCAN table, and back to the gurney, triggered more pain. They gave some other drug and I was pleasantly out and dozing off for the next couple hours. By 3:45am the stone had passed and they released me and we drove back to the home office in Easton.
We arrived a little after 4am and I felt pretty good for the first time in days. My wife cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, and I sat at my computer and printed out work sheets, notes, and other materials. Now you are probably asking why didn’t we simply just go to bed? The reason is that there were three, two hour, FOCUS group seminars scheduled at my home office starting at 9am (in about 4 hours). There was no way to cancel them in such short notice. I finished printing and setting up the room about 5am. Went to bed and got up 2 ½ hours later when my phone began ringing with the last minute attendee sign-ups.
Saturday morning found me conducting the first mini-seminar from 9-11am which was on creative real estate offers using local standard forms and creative addenda. The next was from 11:30am-1:30pm, concerning wealth building strategies by saving your spending money. My wife had gone out for pizzas and arrived just in time for the break. The toll of only 2 ½ hours sleep Saturday morning, the lack of good sleep for both Wednesday and Thursday nights, the physical trauma to my body passing a kidney stone, and the demands for me to perform teaching since 9am was finally catching up to me. However, I got my second wind (or maybe third or fourth), and started the last seminar just a little past 2pm. Once I get speaking and teaching my body and mind block out any negatives (including pain) and my students get great energetic instruction. This was the case during this last seminar. Everyone loved it, we had a good time, and it ended just past 4:30pm. People hung out for a while and just past 5 I threw everyone out.
We were supposed to have some friends over for dinner, but earlier in the day at one of the breaks, Becky told me that they had cancelled due to illness.
So, my wife and I, and her brother who was visiting, along with Maggie the dog, all jumped into the car and went for a ride to enjoy the sunny warmth of what was left of the day. We picked up some fresh fruit and vegetables, along with a couple of RedBox movies. We got back about an hour later, ate dinner, watched the movies in the home theater, and I finally went to bed about 11:00pm.
That brings us to right now. It’s 7:51am Sunday morning. I just took the last two hours writing about what happened the last three days. It has taken me exactly two hours, and I enjoyed a hot cup of Earl Grey tea with honey and fresh ginger. I feel pretty good, although still a little sore. In about 3 minutes I’ll put on a pot of coffee and start preparing some blueberry pancakes. Then I’ll wake up my wife and brother in law, we’ll eat, then go to the 10:30am service at South Shore Community Church in Bridgewater, MA at the High School.
The rest of the day…who knows. It’s not planned out…for a change.