Barb Hermann:  

Well, I ended up marrying the guy I dated during high school, the year after graduation. For those of you that knew me, his name was Ed. We were married for almost 10 years, and had one son. He is now 22 years old. I also have two other kids...another boy that is 18, and a daughter that's 13. I have also been married two more times since being divorced from Ed. Still haven't had the greatest of luck, but I'm still married to #3, going on 15 years, in October. Yippeeeeee! I was certainly hoping that the third time was going to be the charm, but, oh well! Whatcha gonna do? At least, I got a wonderful daughter out of the deal. So, I would never regret being married this time around. Anyway, since graduation, I continued working at MGIC until 1989, when I finally decided to give a 2 or 3 day notice and QUIT!!!! I couldn't stand it any more! Between the continuing back problems and the constant stress that I was under there, I don't know which was worse! Unfortunately, though, I ended up going back to full-time work, not too long afterwards, as I ended up divorcing Ed in March of 1990. So, I had to get a steady job to support me and my son. Over the next several years, I had office jobs that kept me pretty well grounded. Unfortunately, I had a lot of back problems, and with having two kids now, I ended up missing work here and there, from them being sick, and ended up losing a fairly good job. Once I got back to work, I ended up working 60-65 hours per week. What fun! NOTTTT!!!! By the year 2000, my back was in such sad shape, my doctor deemed me unable to work, any more. Since then, I have found out that I have some very severe medical conditions. The first one being diabetes. After that, everything went downhill. I found out that I had high cholesterol, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, and thyroid problems. Then, along with those problems, came depression. After all of that, a couple of years later, I started to develop some other problems...stumbling, headaches, neck pain, confusion, and other troubles. After going through many tests and MRI's, the doctor finally determined I had a condition called Chiari Malformation I. I ended up having major surgery in December of 2006, on the back of my head, to scrape away a portion of the brainstem that was resting on the spinal canal, supposedly causing a lot of the problems that I was having. Unfortunately, after the surgery, I didn't have any relief from the problems, plus, some of them became worse. The worst part, is that the doctor then told me, that was a...Expand for more