Lost

I apologize in advance for the great wall of text you see before you. For some reason the forum pulled out all the paragraph indents, spacing, and other formatting.

I am brand new to truck driving. I know very little about it at all (I've been reading forums for a few weeks now)and was hoping to get some information from experienced drivers to help me makesome educated and life changing decisions. I've got a million questions. Maybeyour answers can help me decide if I am cut out to be a truck driver. I knowthat no one can make the decision for me, but others could certainly help swaymy decision one way or the other after reading about my situation. I guess I will go ahead and just lay it all out there. Bare with me as my questions willlikely hop from one extreme to the next. I appreciate the hard truth andanything else anyone- experienced or not- would like to ad to the discussion.

Immediate things that are drawing meto the trucking industry:
Relatively quick and easy to obtain a Class A license
Abundance of jobs all over the nation
Pay scale. I've seen everything from $35,000 your first year up to $100,000+ for experienced drivers advertised.
Benefits, medical/ dental/ vision
Retirement plan
Living in the truck while on the road

A little about myself and some of thereasons that have led me to the trucking industry:

I am 36 years old, just very recently going through a divorce. I have no children or a social life really. I do not have anyone in my family that I am close to. My wife/ soon to be ex wife has been my lover and best friend for 12 years. Her companionship filled any void of needing to be sorrounded by friends/ family. I've read about the solitary lifestyle truckers have so its tough to say if this would effect me. As it is,my best friend is gone anyway so trucking or not, I'm going to be missing thatto some extent.
With the seperation comes finding a new place to live. That means sharing an apartment with strangers (mostly younger college students as thats what is around my area), something I am not keen on, but I have very few options. If I luck out, I could stay with mymother for a few months. Obviously niether being an ideal situation for a grown adult. I no longer will be covered by my wifes medical/ dental/ vision insurance, or her income. All that also makes supporting myself much more difficult.

As for my health, I am overweight. I weigh in at about 320lbs and I've been working towards loosing weight. The recent seperation has made that tremendously difficult to focus on obviously, but I am continuing to try. I also have sleep apnea. I do use a CPAP machine while I sleep. It helps me a great deal, and other than needing the CPAP tosleep at night, it does not effect me at all, no medications or day time drowsiness, etc.. On top of all that though, I have a bad back. Chronic back pain daily. Its tolerable without medication but I somewhat regularly take Ibuprophen. Working doing heavy lifting or standing on my feet 8+ hours daily is no longer doable for me. Sitting up straight is fine assuming the trucks have decent low back support or room for a cushion. One other problem worth mentioning, I recently developed a hemmorhoid. Long time sitting in airport, then long flightin a very uncomfortable seat, then more airport sitting and another flight. Its pretty embarrassing to admit but I hope to get it treated very soon and be past it. Not sure if this is going to be a long term recurring problem or not but I assume a lot of truckers may be dealing with the same thing from the continuous sitting. I take a few meds but nothing that would disqualify me for driving (as far as I can tell) except the muscle relaxers for my back. I very rarely ever use those and only at night.

I have just lost my dead end job inthe manufacturing industry making $12hr. and I don't have alot of other skills. I do have schooling (two A.S. degrees in the automotive field) and solid knowledge in the automotive industry (auto tech/ mechanic training) but I have a bad back so that is a jobI wouldn't be able to do full time, or possibly even part time. Part time in that field would mean workingat another dead end place doing lube jobs and washing cars if I was real lucky.I began schooling to get a job as a drafter but the recent seperation means Ino longer have the funds that I did to support that easily. The drafting schooling will take another year and a half (or possibly two depending on scheduling) to complete and may likely not have benefits or any kind of retirement plan once I do actually find a job in that field- those are tremendously important to me right now too. Not to mention I would likelybe competing with Architects and Engineers for jobs. Because my wife and I do, and have done our taxes jointly for the past several years, I do not qualify for financial aid for schooling, or lowincome housing. It will be that way until atleast next year, possibly the oneafter- assuming I can make it that far down the line..

That is my background thus far. As you can tell, I've not got the odds stacked in my favor. I'm extremely nervous, lost, scared, frustrated, worried, and just plan confused trying to figure out all these major aspects of my life in a relatively short span of time. Questions and a lot more to follow in the next post. Would appreciate any comments, concerns, questions, or anything else helpful or not.

Seeing your life laid out and written down on paper can be tough to look at. Downright depressing even.

-alone

 

I appreciate the advice. I've downloaded the paper work and began filling it out. I plan to go into the Dr. in the coming week or next. The questions regarding chronic back and sleep disorders is what lead me to searching and even mentioning it in the post above. I see there is a great deal of drivers out there that use or refuse to use CPAP's and that there is a lot of varied info out there about dealing with while being a trucker.