Thursday, December 11
Watch out!
Been a while since the last post...
About 7 hours after that last post in August, I started having severe abdominal pains, vomiting and diarhea. I thought I had yet another kidney stone, something I've had before.
My wife took me to the closest hospital, Memorial Herman Southeast. You get through the Emergency Room Triage rather quickly when they think you have Kidney Stones. I don't remember much after arriving at the hospital. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital thinking it was a couple of days later. My mom was there, and told me that it wasn't a couple of days later, but closer to thirty, and I was in a different hospital, St Lukes in the Texas Medical Center. I had suffered an attack of Acute Pancreatitis followed by ARDS, followed by Renal Failure, and had nearly died.
This would be a strange enough way to start the day, but thanks to the drugs I had been given, I had been halucinating and having lucid dreams while I was in the hospital. I thought that my father was dead, my wife had left me, and that I had been on some sort of cannibalistic frency killing and eating people. I had also been on at least 4 ships, married a woman from Ecuador and died once in these dreams/halucinations.
Kind of a wierd day. Then, when I started to come to terms with the mental part, as nothing my mother was saying made any less sense to me than anything else, I got the fun physical news. I'd been in a drug induced coma for most of the time I was down. Guess what, I'd lost 40 pounds, all my fat, and a lot of muscle. 35 years old, and can't sit up in the bed, feed myself, walk or anything else. I couldn't even dial the phone in the hospital reliably.
I was in the hospital for about a week after I woke up. Once I was alert and awake, I started demanding physical therapy immediately. I left the hospital on September 9th. This was a full two weeks and three days before the doctors expected me to get out of bed and start physical therapy. The doctors also expected me to be in intensive physical therapy at the hospital for at least a couple of months. Instead, I chose to go home and do outpatient physical therapy two days a week. The doctors prescribed me 12 weeks of this therapy. But after 6 weeks, the therapists said I was doing well enought I didn't need to go any more.
I started back to work on November 3rd. The doctors didn't expect me to start back to work till early 2004. They didn't know me very well. I did come back with weight and rest restrictions, but I am back working. Installed a Terminal Services server yesterday, and I'm working on an a new Exchange 2003 server. Life is good.
Oh, and when I woke up from the Coma and found out that my wife hadn't left me, folks also reminded me that she was pregnant, and starting to show. We had a beautiful baby boy on December 1, 2004. Life is great.
About 7 hours after that last post in August, I started having severe abdominal pains, vomiting and diarhea. I thought I had yet another kidney stone, something I've had before.
My wife took me to the closest hospital, Memorial Herman Southeast. You get through the Emergency Room Triage rather quickly when they think you have Kidney Stones. I don't remember much after arriving at the hospital. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital thinking it was a couple of days later. My mom was there, and told me that it wasn't a couple of days later, but closer to thirty, and I was in a different hospital, St Lukes in the Texas Medical Center. I had suffered an attack of Acute Pancreatitis followed by ARDS, followed by Renal Failure, and had nearly died.
This would be a strange enough way to start the day, but thanks to the drugs I had been given, I had been halucinating and having lucid dreams while I was in the hospital. I thought that my father was dead, my wife had left me, and that I had been on some sort of cannibalistic frency killing and eating people. I had also been on at least 4 ships, married a woman from Ecuador and died once in these dreams/halucinations.
Kind of a wierd day. Then, when I started to come to terms with the mental part, as nothing my mother was saying made any less sense to me than anything else, I got the fun physical news. I'd been in a drug induced coma for most of the time I was down. Guess what, I'd lost 40 pounds, all my fat, and a lot of muscle. 35 years old, and can't sit up in the bed, feed myself, walk or anything else. I couldn't even dial the phone in the hospital reliably.
I was in the hospital for about a week after I woke up. Once I was alert and awake, I started demanding physical therapy immediately. I left the hospital on September 9th. This was a full two weeks and three days before the doctors expected me to get out of bed and start physical therapy. The doctors also expected me to be in intensive physical therapy at the hospital for at least a couple of months. Instead, I chose to go home and do outpatient physical therapy two days a week. The doctors prescribed me 12 weeks of this therapy. But after 6 weeks, the therapists said I was doing well enought I didn't need to go any more.
I started back to work on November 3rd. The doctors didn't expect me to start back to work till early 2004. They didn't know me very well. I did come back with weight and rest restrictions, but I am back working. Installed a Terminal Services server yesterday, and I'm working on an a new Exchange 2003 server. Life is good.
Oh, and when I woke up from the Coma and found out that my wife hadn't left me, folks also reminded me that she was pregnant, and starting to show. We had a beautiful baby boy on December 1, 2004. Life is great.
Number of people who will never get their time back from reading this page:
