For this post I am going to talk a little about my background. I was born in Medford Oregon, which is where most of my family still lives, after living there for a few years, until about 2nd grade I believe, my mother and I moved to Reno Nevada. I was raised by my mom as my father left before I was born, I met him around age 20 and he claimed to not know about me but my mother swears he did, anyway, we lived in Reno until I was in 7th grade after which we moved back to Oregon to a town I still consider Home, Brookings. Ironic that a place I call home and love so much could be at least a part of how I ended up with MS, you see studies have shown that there is a higher rate of MS being diagnosed for people who have lived in Pacific Northwest than anywhere else. Of course no one knows why that is. I spent my teen years in Brookings more or less just like any other teenage boy who lives in a very rural setting does; I got in a little trouble here and there, did a lot of hunting and fishing, and enjoyed the summer days with my friends and family. As I mentioned, when I was 20 I met my dad for the first time. He was remarried and living down just outside Los Angeles and I moved down for a year with him and his new family. Unfortunately he had previously beaten colon cancer only to have cancer return. Colon cancer runs in his family, I actually need to get screened soon, in fact his brother and father both died of colon cancer. Anyway cancer returned a few months after meeting him after which I lived at University of Southern California’s hospital in LA with my step-mom and my half-sister while my father slowly died. After his death I returned home to Brookings, met a girl, went to work for my step-dad as a plumber for a few years until finally realizing that I CANNOT WORK FOR FAMILY, lol. I had a friend in Michigan, whom I had grown up with and gave a call to one day who said “bring your butt to Michigan”, so in fact I did. He just happened to be a cargo manager for a cargo airliner that at the time primarily shipped parts for the Big 3 automakers. He got me a place to live, got me a job and for a while things were beautiful. I loved my new job as a ground service technician for the airline. It was fun, it was exciting, it had great perks and it paid pretty damn good. Wow, I had a career, after just a few months there, not knowing anything about planes before I started, I became a supervisor on the midnight shift, several months later I became the supervisor on the day shift. I was moving up and moving up fast, my manager was studying for his pilot’s license and had it in the works to become a pilot for our company, USA Jet/Active Aero, the word was that I was going to be taking his place. Unfortunately the owner of our company had a heart attack on New Years in Vegas which lead to the V.P. of one of our departments taking over the company for a while. It was also around this time that Ford starting having problems with their SUV tires and sales slowed drastically, this lead to layoffs from which I should have been safe from however it just so happened I had really pissed off the V.P. who was now in charge earlier in my short lived career. So ends my stint in Michigan.
Alright ladies and gents, I think I am done for the night. I will pick up this fairly boring story tomorrow with “How I ended up in Iowa”, and folks, I promise you, it does not get any better, well until I get to how I ended up here in the suburbs of Chicago.
Until then, C’est la vie!
Jamie
Vicki's MS Gazette Debuts
12 years ago
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