Thanks for your good wishes and best of luck with the colitis--that sounds miserable.
You needn't worry about your grammar or punctuation, since good or bad grammar goes right past everyone most of the time, and punctuation is inaudible, more a pastime for crossword puzzle freaks and English majors than anything of interest to normal people.
The late Ross Thomas amused himself by having the main characters in his thrillers "speak" much "better" in print than his other characters. He sometimes poked a little fun at his slightly stilted language, once having an over-educated foreigner answer the telephone with "It is I, Parvis Mansour," which showed a perfect understanding of the technically correct subjective case for a predicate pronoun following a linking verb, but a complete failure to understand how stilted and unnatural it sounds to the ordinary ear.
I confess that I grew tired of watching my poor therapists painfully scribbling "right upper extremity." They admitted that there was no earthly reason to avoid "right arm" unless treating the goddess Kali, but they could no more abandon their medical tradition than I could stop writing like this.
