Those other nine years

By the time Waking Walt was published in 2002, the doctors had diagnosed the problem I was having breathing. They called it COPD -- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. I called it SAD -- Stupid And Dumb. Even though my father, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer at age 52, I had the sharpness of mind, the grand intelligence, and the brilliance to smoke for 30 years.

There is no cure for COPD. It slowly, but surely destroys your lung capacity. At first it was just an annoyance. I couldn't walk up our slightly uphill driveway to get the mail. Then it put me in the hospital, with pneumonia. Then they put me on oxygen - just at night. Then 24/7. If I wanted to go anywhere, I had to take a portable oxygen tank.

Of course, I could still type. But without a lot of imagination. I wrote a couple of short stories that were included in collections with several other authors called "Secrets." And in 2005 I published "Lyrics of Life in four-part harmony" a collection of poetry I'd written over the years.

But what I did mostly was slowly go down hill. I remember getting out my research on the "King" book, every so often, and I read most of The Once and Future King again, but it was all too hard.

Then, in 2006, at the recommendation of Dr. Layish, my pulmonary doctor in Orlando, Harriet and I went to Shands Hospital at the University of Florida. Over the next two years, working with the Shands  lung transplant team under the direction of Dr, Maher Baz, I found myself on the transplant list. And on May 13, 2008 I had a double lung transplant.

It was a couple of years later, with some ups and down, that I began to seriously work on the project that ended up being titled Future King (as in the Once and...)