Sept. 16, 2013: 9:30am: Listening to "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins

Hi Moosehat, unique name Lisa. I wanted to thank you for taking your time & educating me on hamstring injuries. I have had more positive help & responses since I started doing this blog earlier this year than I have had in over a decade in prison. Do you, or anyone else reading, know anything about a herniated disc? I have a herniated disc between my L-4/L-5 vertebrae & this is causing extremely painful sciatica. The medical dept. continues to give me anti inflammatories. & for the love of God, I do not understand why. What good will this do for my back pain & in healing the disc? I don't even know if the disc will heal itself or not. I wrote to 2 back doctors that I saw in the newspaper & asked for any brochures or pamphlets just to educate myself. In prison they do not treat the problem. They treat the symptoms. When they call diabetes lines for medical,over 200 people, about 11% of this prison goes to it. They don't fix problems, they medicate to treat the symptoms. My neighbor has a bad liver. He's on ibuprofen & some days he'll feel so bad, he'll sleep for 36 hours & not even eat. A part of this blog was to hopefully educate people on the outside about the inside of prison. It's not easy & it's no cakewalk. Thank you for reading what I write. I am not very educated. I got my GED at 18 or 19. I can't remember the exact year. I think I was 18 but my memory is continuing to get worse. But I remember the woman's name who was my tutor in jail. She would come in every week after work & help me study, teach me. All on her own time. Thank you, Jeannie Steward, wherever you are. Some days I have a horrible attitude & a real negative outlook on life but none of that will help me with life & it definitely won't encourage people to read what I write. Who wants to read the writings of a miserable man. So I try to put that aside & just talk when I write. Some days I do get depressed & get pretty pessimistic but I try to be as optimistic as I possibly can. Right now I have decided to start doing legal work again. Though I will be completely lost & I will have to start from scratch, I have to try. I don't want to die in here. I've seen enough death in my life. I've caused way too much pain in this world to take credit for anything but I am trying to do better, be better, someone that my Justine would look down on & be proud of. The problem with prison is that there is so much selfishness, so much hatred. There are so many things you might want to do but you never have enough time in the day. I used to stretch all the time. Years ago when I first got into extreme fitness & hi intense cardio, I liked stretching. It hurt so much but I was getting better. Then one day I got hurt. Was on the sidelines for 2months. & I said stretching helped nothing. So I quit. Now everything is so tight & stiff, getting back into it is not easy. I also want to go to the library & see if they have a beginners yoga book. Never hurts to expand my horizons, I guess. Before I go, let me ask you, & anyone else who is reading my blog, what made you decide to read my blog, & what do you think I could do to make it better? This is not just therapeutic for me, but I would also like to use it as a tool to find people who can help make change in prisons in my state. Right now it's just an idea but what can I do to expand the amount of men & women who read this? I want to make my blog better, more interesting. I would really appreciate any input, comments & suggestions from anyone reading. Thank you very much. Take care, stay safe & God bless. Thanx Lisa, ciao.