After a few years spent trying my hand at various types of sales jobs, I decided to go back into the restaurant business. This time, however, I wasn’t joining another cookie-cutter franchise with its 300-page operations manual telling you how to do everything from the amount of ice to put in a drink to how [...]
By the eighth chapter of my book, Get Back Up, I have made my way out of the South Philly projects, joined and been released from the army with a service connected disability, worked in fast food until I was so badly injured in a car accident that I could no longer stand on my [...]
We’re now in the seventh chapter of my book, Get Back Up, I could no longer work in the fast food industry due to the injuries I 'd suffered in a car accident, and so I was about to begin a new career as a life insurance salesman. I would learn that sales can be a [...]
In the sixth chapter of my book Get Back Up, I have been released from the army with a service-connected disability. Thanks to the disabled veterans bill I’d be able to pay for college, but because it would be a few months until the next quarter began, I decided to get a job. I ended up working [...]
In the fifth chapter of my book Get Back Up, Johnson and I join the army. It was 1974 and the United States was just getting out of the Vietnam War. It’s not that Johnson and I wanted to join the army out of some great need to sacrifice for our country, it was that we didn’t [...]
In the fourth chapter of my book Get Back Up I talk about meeting my lifelong friend Mark Johnson, or just Johnson, as I have called him for years. Johnson and I met in 1969 and we remain friends to this day, seeing each other often. Johnson was from the type of family where the parents [...]
It’s been a few months since my last article about my prostate cancer treatment. That’s the thing about active surveillance, or watchful waiting; there’s a lot of waiting. During the past months I’ve continued to get PSA tests. My doctor said that if the number stayed low, I could wait until the one-year anniversary of [...]
In the third chapter of my book Get Back Up I talk about our family’s early days in Tampa. My father had used the money he’d finally received from the Social Security Administration to move us out of the projects of South Philadelphia to our own home in Tampa, Florida. He also bought a small [...]
In the second chapter of my book Get Back Up I talk about my first few months in our new town of Tampa, Florida. How we got there is a story of persistence; my father’s tenacity, not mine. I frankly learned very few things from my father other than how to block and duck [...]
If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been writing about my battle with prostate cancer. If you haven’t seen the articles you can find them here: https://georgeasantino.com/book/blog/ . The last article detailed my decision to go with active surveillance rather than surgery. This requires me to have follow-up PSA tests and another [...]
