smack
Off-topic letter of happiness and joy follows:
I am so very, VERY happy (joyful, even) to be back amongst the living. Around the 8th or 9th of January I started to feel... well, "funky". I ended up in the Emergency Room last weekend. I was sent home after about 12 hours with some strong antibiotics and was claimed to have pneumonia. My condition worsened early last week a I ended up back at the Emergency Room on Tuesday. At that point I couldn't breathe and had an oxygen saturation of 50% and was coughing up blood (not very pleasant). Since breathing is a "Good Thing", needless to say it looked (and to me felt) like I was headed from "feeling funky" to just having a "funk" (as in the smell of death).
I was put in the Intensive Care Unit and stayed there for 4 very long days and 3 endless nights. My daily or twice-daily chest x-rays apparently showed that the pneumonia "bloomed like cauliflower" (a very colorful phrase from my doctor) as it spread from a single lung to both lungs. I was upgraded from "pneumonia in one lung" to "atypical pneumonia in both lungs". The weird thing was that while my wife and family were in a state of panic and my little 2 1/2 year old girl apparently kept asking "where Daddy?" and it looked pretty grim to everyone - I was so, so, so, very tired (more-so and in a different manner than any other time in my life!) that in a strange way I didn't even notice, nor really care that I may not make it. Between the ER visits and subsequent ICU stay and when I first got home I also couldn't even "go to work" (work, being self-employed, was in the basement) because I didn't care and simply could not even walk that distance without getting so tired and out of breath. Heck - even when I had my back surgery in 2006 and the resultant staph infection and two emergency surgeries two weeks later, I never missed more than a couple days of being online!
So - now I am back home (albeit on oxygen at nights for the next couple weeks), recuperating, back online, and so VERY HAPPY to be posting again, let alone still living and loving my family! It truly is good to be back enjoying the simple silly pleasures in life, like playing TCH Scrabble and just, well.... living!
Enjoy your family, little ones, friends, furry friends (my cats really missed me ) and all those "little things" that are really big things but that we sometimes forget to enjoy. You always hear of people dying of pneumonia and hear of how many more would pass away barring the new medical technologies, etc. But it doesn't seem really REAL until you're 36, with a precious little toddler and laying in the ICU not sure if you'll make it out... I really am glad to be back and glad to have finally met more TCH folks in the past several weeks, after more or less lurking since something like June 2003, and I look forward to hopefully more years of fun and games with my online family and continuing to meet new folks on these forums.
Enjoying life and happy to have it,
Patrick
