The first miracle was that there was a really great hospital available to me that was just the right size to accommodate me and that had really high tech stuff and well trained personnel to keep me alive at all the right times there in Mt. Shasta.
The second miracle was that they told me I had the single most robust immune system they had ever seen which is kind of surprising since I just turned 67.
Then, my wife, my friends and everyone I knew or was worried about me including health care professionals circled the wagons so to speak and watched over me in various ways. They knew I wasn't myself, especially when I had extreme sleep deprivation when I couldn't sleep more than an hour a day for several weeks because I was coughing all the time because of the breathing tube they put down my windpipe that inflates so reflux doesn't kill you during surgery.
After 2 to 3 weeks of not sleeping more than 1 hour a day it really changes a person psychologically to the point where it is hard to decipher reality from dreams at many points.
Then, after the operation on April 4th I was released from the hospital 5 days later and realized I couldn't take the antibiotics the doctors prescribed until I reached my home in the Greater San Francisco Area and my wife and I had many arguments until she realized I wasn't going to give in on this because I knew my body and if I took antibiotics then I was just going to throw up and land myself back in Mercy Medical, especially if we were driving south on Interstate 5 towards San Francisco. So, we both were sort of having panic attacks over this and being released from the hospital is a very strange experience where you go from being told what to do for 5 days to recover from your operation to trying to take care of yourself again anyway you can and to take care of the new holes you have in your abdomen from Laproscopic surgery to remove the Pus pocket from the burst appendicitis before you die of Sepsis or something like that.
ON top of that I had removed my own drain tube which drained the poisons for about 4 days after the operation which surprised greatly my surgeon and any nearby nurses. However, my point of view is that when they tried to remove it it was very painful and since I was in my body I could remove it so it would be much less painful than what they were doing. So, to me, this was completely logical. Besides I had delivered my son in 1974 along with my 1st wife with no doctors or medical personnel present which likely would have surprised them to that we did this by choice. But, we had taken a LaMaze Course before we did this. So, we had things like shoe strings to tie off the umbilical cord and alcohol for sterilization of instruments and scissors to cut the umbilical cord and then when the placenta came out we put it in the freezer (many people then made a pie out of it and ate it) but we didn't have the nerve to do this in the end so it just stayed in the freezer for a couple of months.
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Learn about the Lamaze method of giving birth and whether it might be right for you, and how to find a Lamaze childbirth class near you.Lamaze
I guess what I'm saying is the sight of blood doesn't make me pass out. In fact, it just makes me focus on how to save whatever person's life is there including my own. This is just who I am.
However, when I reached home and my wife and her friend kept telling me what to do I found I was confused in my mind because of sleep deprivation and it didn't matter what they told me it didn't make any sense to me.
So, I realized then that I needed to put myself back together again by myself. So, I got a new set of tires put on my motor home and I left to try to pull myself back together. Sort of going Walkabout to try to put myself back together and try to get some sleep. This upset my wife and many people but I knew at the time that I couldn't put myself back together around a lot of people. It was a lot like having PTSD where you want to be alone somewhere to try to make sense of your life after a very traumatic experience of one kind or another.
I felt then like my personality was like Mercury in someone's hand and that someone had clapped that hand and the mercury was all over the room in pieces and that some how I had to gather all the pieces of myself and put them all back together somehow.
I eventually succeeded in this but not really until I reached the Klamath River a couple of days later. There is a rest stop on Interstate 5 just before you drive into Oregon where you can park along the Klamath River. So, I rolled out the awning on my motor home and set up a folding chair and just watched the beautiful Klamath river go by for about 3 or 4 hours. By doing this I started to get a handle on peace once again. So, by the time I rolled into Ashland, Oregon that night I had a place to start healing myself from everything that had happened to me the previous month.
I spent several days at Bard's Inn there on the upper story where I had flowering trees and spring happening all around. It was there I started to sleep more than 1 hour a night and started to get a handle on my life once again. Within a few days I realized I shouldn't be driving the motor home to Portland and instead should park the motor home in long term parking at Medford Airport and fly to Portland, Oregon.
However, my daughter and her boyfriend were very busy and it wasn't convenient to them. I said I wasn't coming to be convenient to them I was coming for my birthday as I wanted to see the Moody Blues in Concert there and that my wife and her friend and daughter were going to join me there.
Flying up was sort of a miracle to get a ticket on short notice but then the sun strobed through the prop jet which wasn't good for me because I had blunt trauma childhood epilepsy which meant I was going to pass out from the sun strobing through the props. So, I covered my eyes. This kept me from passing out but I think this stimulus eventually led to me having more problems from coughing and at altitude I couldn't get enough oxygen so the stewardess put me on oxygen and had a physician sit next to me until we landed in Portland. Then paramedics met the plane but I mentioned to them that at landing altitude I was fine. It was just at altitude when there isn't as much air in the plane for a variety of reasons that I was having problems. When you go up in a commercial plane oxygen is slowly pumped into the cabin but it is important to realize that you are basically breathing air at that point that is somewhere between 7000 and 12,000 feet in altitude at that point and not air at sea level. So, this is why I was having problems when I was coughing.
So, when I arrived in Portland my daughter was worried about me and wouldn't let me rent a car right then. I argued with her because she hadn't said she was going to meet me at the airport so I expected to deal with all this alone. After a while, I realized she was doing this because she loved me and not for any other reason so I gave in realizing it was going to cost me about 70 dollars tomorrow to get a cab back to the airport to rent my 2015 Camaro for my birthday. So, my daughter and her boyfriend drove me to my hotel.
So, as you can see slowly from the time I left my home on the San Francisco Coast in my motorhome I slowly got myself back in order to where I began to feel like my old self once again. So, by the time my wife and her friend flew up for the Moody Blues Concert all was relatively well once again with my life.
We went to the Moody Blues live concert there and I rented my 2015 Metallic Red Camaro convertible and we celebrated my surviving all this and my birthday quite well.
Thank you God. I'm back.
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