Oh, yes. I remember the house painting and the heavy metal poisoning. The other things I don't remember knowing about. Anyone of that on it's own is plenty, though, so I'm sorry to hear about everything combined. The fact you've gotten this far over the last 25 years is an achievement unto self, I believe. Probably not much consolation, I guess, but there's always going to be better days and worse days.
Well, I've been writing for most of my adult life, in one form or another, and so yeah, after a while, you can learn how to craft sentences. It's funny that writing books and writing newspaper articles tend to be on different ends of the writing spectrum in many ways, but they also have a lot in common. You don't really want any wasted space in either, surprisingly, but you also want to flesh things out enough for the reader to get something out of it. So, I try to incorporate that as much as I can in anything I do here on Steemit.