I’ve been sick for a while now, which is why I haven’t been posting much, but I thought it was just normal sickness. Mostly it involved looking incredibly pale, sleeping all the time and headaches. It kept getting worse and worse until two weeks ago I got dizzy spells and started throwing up, I couldn’t stomach food. Usually when I get sick to my stomach it lasts no more than a few days. So after a week I went to the doctor, last Thursday, expecting a sinus infection was behind everything.

He took one look at me and sent me over to the hospital for a blood test. When my blood count came in at 54 (140-160 is normal), I was immediately sent to the ER and started getting blood transfusions. They assumed I had a GI bleed and sent me in for a gastroscope the next day. (Bonus that the scope punching through my esophagus has eased my usual difficulty swallowing pills.)

The scope found nothing. So they referred me to the lead Internist in the hospital, who was incredibly busy. For almost a week I waited to see him, and in the mean time the general doctor overseeing my case (Dr. Reid, fantastic guy) ran multiple blood tests, everything he could think of. Other than my blood being low (they stopped giving me transfusions when I hit around 80) and a bad Potassium (which I had to drink this awful medicine to fix) they couldn’t see a problem. I showed none of the signs of bleeding, or any of the other conditions he knew about.

Finally, they referred me to a different Internist, who came and saw me the same day he got the referral. Problem was, he had no clue what was wrong either. He said his normal next step would be to check my bone marrow, but because I’m rather overweight and have an odd bone structure, though, they’d like to avoid that. So instead he referred me to a blood specialist (hemotologist?).

But, the good news is I can work with him as an outpatient, since my blood has hovered around 80 for days and I seem stable.

So, I’m home. I’m still sick, I barely feel like doing anything but watching TV and browsing the web, and I probably have a mass of blood and other tests in my future, but I’m home at least.

In any case, business-wise I’m making progress. Plans are made so I can start the hosting side of the business with just the $500 from ODSP, in a way that I can keep it in business even if I don’t get any clients for months. Hopefully I will, though. I think I’ve found my niche, too, but I won’t be mentioning what just yet, as I have to think about how to take advantage of it first.

So, things are going well. Hopefully won’t be too much longer until I’m ready to go.

Sorry I haven’t been around very much! After being sick for three weeks (and still not totally 100% recovered, that infection did a number to my airways), I’ve been scrambling to catch up with work. I’ve met with my Employment Support provider, from the company Northern Lights, and after discussing it with him it looks like I might start out with just hosting, and add the other business elements once I get the money for the software and hardware I need.

On the up side, I’ll get experience setting up an e-commerce site by setting up my own, before anybody asks me to make one. Also, by the time I’m ready CS5 will be out, so I can go directly to it. (I’m very excited about CS5. Especially Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill and pretty much all of Flash Catalyst.)

Anyway, the point of this is to say I was going to call the service providers today but I have absolutely no voice from coughing. I’m going to give it one more day, but if I have no voice again tomorrow, I’ll send it by email. (That was my original plan, but I thought it’d be better to talk to them directly.)

Now, I won’t bore with too many details, (though feel free to comment and ask questions), but the meeting was mainly to get information from me on what I planned to do, and explain how ODSP can help and how running a business will effect my Income Support payments. (In general, they deduct half of what I make, minus approved expenses, from my monthly cheque. The example in the info packet I was given was someone who made $350/month from her business, and got deducted $75/month from her cheque. There’s also a $100/month bonus if you make a positive net income.)

My next step is to review the two service providers they gave me to decide which I want to work with. I’m supposed to call or email both but I’ve already almost made up my mind just by looking at their web sites. One is dedicated to ODSP clients, the other just offers disability employment supports as one very small fraction of their overall business (which serves 160000 clients a year, most of whom would be paying clients). Personally, I’d rather deal with the one who specializes in dealing with those like me, and have far fewer clients to deal with so they can put more of their time and effort into helping me. There’s other factors too, but that’s mainly what it comes down to. Still, I’ll email both and see what they have to say.

In other news, I finally decided on a web hosting solution. I’m going with an American company rather than Canadian, but I’ll make that clear to my clients in case they want to go another route. It’s just that I couldn’t find a Canadian source with a good enough reputation and all the features I need. Some had great customer support, but when visiting their sites it went slow as molasses. Others had great web service, but had reputations for cheating clients or massive downtimes. So, I’m going with Innohosting.com They have great reputations, they’re affordable, and have great customer service. And they have all the features I want.

Well, that’s it for now. More news as I have something to report!