Going and going, and going...

Several folks have asked me if I planned to post anything more in Dry Crusts, so here I am at the keyboard again. I don’t know how many more posts I’ll get in, but here’s another one.

I’ve been home about a week now following another trip to the hospital. This trip was probably the most serious one so far. One of my nurses said I’m like the Energizer Bunny, I just keep going and going. One of the Energizer commercials mentions that their bunny has a furry little tail. After this last trip, MY furry little tail is feeling pretty bedraggled.

This episode started when I had a coughing fit that lasted about an hour.  Couldn’t put two words together. Once I stopped coughing I couldn’t get my breath. After about three hours, it finally occurred to me to check my oxygen level. I was at 60% saturation when I’m normally 98 or 99%. Most folks pass out at around 55%. I decided it was time to make a trip to the emergency room. I got to the local ER and they put me on a Cpap machine, but it didn’t help. I don’t think they were sure what to do next. My wife insisted they send me to Gotham hospital to see if they could help. A two hour trip, they said I  needed to be stabilized before life-flighting me there in a helicopter. That meant ventilation. They knocked me out, put a tube down my throat and sent me North. 

  

Since it was the weekend, nothing was done until the following Monday. I remained in stasis for about three days before they got around to working on me. I have no memory of anything from the time they knocked me out until I woke up in Gotham except for being in a sort of gray limbo and somebody telling me to squeeze their hand if I could hear them. Once they did a broncoscopy, they discovered a mucus plug had formed in my good lung and caused it to collapse. Once the lung was reinflated, they woke me back up.

I’ve been told that to come off a ventilator and not have any major problems is highly unusual and that I’m a very lucky guy. Personally, I don’t think luck had anything to do with it. I have dozens of people praying for me both locally and elsewhere. You won’t convince me that isn’t what pulled me through this time.

I talked to my oncologist Thursday and he said the imunotherapy treatments have done just about all they can do for me and decided to terminate them. Of all the  patients he put on this therapy at the same time as me, there are only two still alive. I am one of them. But it looks like it’s getting close to the end of the trail for me unless some other miracle treatment is discovered. The end could come tomorrow or maybe six months from now, everybody is different. It’s up to me now to make sure I stay healthy and breathing deeply for as long as I can.

Thanks to EVERYONE for your prayers and well-wishes. It does a WORLD of good.