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I was apparently a lot sicker than I realized.

After discovering 12 days ago that I had gallstones, I spent a lot of time reading about possible treatments, but I slowly became convinced the emergency room doctor had been right. I needed surgery to remove my sickened gallbladder.

I was in enough discomfort — and eventually full-scale pain — that I didn’t work much last week. By Saturday morning, the worst pain of my life was back — and it was even worse this time.

I returned to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham Saturday morning. By that evening, I was admitted to the hospital with plans to get me go home late Sunday if surgery went well that morning. The official diagnosis was acute cholecystitis.

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Toxic people rarely have any idea how toxic they are. In fact, they mostly wonder — with feelings of hurt and outrage — why so many people they’ve loved have been so “unfair” to them.

These people don’t necessarily appear to be monsters. You might like many of them when you first meet them. But if you allow them to stay in your life, they’re going to drag you down — and the start of a new year is a great time to resolve to cut their poisonous influence completely.

As with other toxins, some toxic people are more deadly and dangerous than others. Some are obviously toxic from the beginning. Others present themselves as self-sacrificing saints, so they appear to be good people. Yet others will make you so dependent on them that you dare not upset them.

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The sun has set on another year — and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

It seems as though I feel this way every year. At least for the last decade or so. I start each year with unreasonable hope that this year will be different. I keep hoping this year will be the one when some of the things I need start to come true.

A few years ago, I heard an interview with Harvard University psychologist Dan Gilbert in which he explained that people are terrible at predicting their own futures. In the abstract, people will tell you they know bad things can happen just as easily as good things.

But Gilbert said a consistent pattern shows up when you ask people to predict things in their own futures. If you take all their predictions and group them into a positive pile and a negative pile, the positives they predict for themselves far outweigh the negatives. They simply can’t see that bad things are going to happen.

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