You may have noticed that posting has been very sparse the last several months. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first was the ongoing project of my living space. I may have mentioned here before but where I was moving to, a new but unfinished loft, required a lot of work. I took possession and it was just sheathing and studs. I had to build it all out. The only problem was I had a fixed amount of time to do it in. It was a lot of work but by putting in long hours everyday it was doable. But that did take away some from web activities. The good news is I almost finished in time. I just had to put up all the case moldings etc. and I would have been finished. Then reason number two appeared.

On April 2nd, late in the afternoon, I was sitting here at the computer and I developed a sharp pain in my gut on the left side, kind of high, just under the rib cage. Pretty annoying but not unusual. I have had all kinds of gut problems over the years. I figured it would pass.

It didn’t.

I didn’t get any sleep that night and by early morning the pain was so bad I could no longer take a good breath and was left to panting like a dog. At this point I decided that I should probably see a doctor or something. So I went to an urgent care center around the corner. They acted like it was serious or something. They shot me full of morphine (which didn’t help a lot but made me care about it less) and shoved me into an ambulance that took me off to the nearest hospital.

In the emergency room they too acted like it was serious. And hustled me down to CT scan. The next thing I know they are inserting a NG tube(boy that is unpleasant) and shooting me off to surgery. I find out later that what I had was something called a small bowel volvulus. That’s like really rare, the docs told me that they had all read about them but had never seen one before. Basically the entire small bowel twists itself around it’s own blood supply. This is not conducive to continued life. (It’s also really painful). The surgeon said if they had delayed another hour or so I would be dead. That’s pretty scary. But the surgery went well, I had the pain button so all was good and I should be able to go home in 4 or 5 days (pretty major incision) depending on when my intestines started working again.

It took longer then that. After about a week in there I suddenly started having breathing problems. Serious breathing problems. Very scary. It turns out I had developed a large amount of fluid around both lungs and my left lung had collapsed. And I learned first hand that having chest tubes inserted is as brutal as they look. Not fun. I had to spend a few days in ICU. And had a bunch of other small problems like losing all my veins because of the massive amounts of IV antibiotics which requires the placement of a PICCS line(sort of a semi permanent IV thing). Just had all kinds of fun experiences. At one point I asked the doc if I was getting out of there alive. I wasn’t joking.

I sent almost three weeks total in hospital and am slowly recovering at home, in my still unfinished loft. But hey what are you going to do? The good news is the surgeons told me that all the gut problems I have had over the last 20 years or so will probably not reappear as they fixed some other things while they had all my guts out. The bad news is the volvulus could happen again at any time and that I am at high risk for that. Great.

Having not been in a hospital since I was a kid it was an interesting experience. I learned a couple of thing. One thing is, and it is sort of a corollary or law, that the more embarrassing a procedure the more attractive the nurse. And hospital food is worse then they say.