260627 I hope I never experience anything like what I did in the early days of this month.

This post is true and as best as I can remember.

I’m lucky to be alive today. I was near death for 9 days earlier this month.

My recent hospital time was brutal. I was near death when I got to the emergency area. I don’t know why they call it an emergency entrance, because it’s anything but that. It should be called hospital check in because they take your name and tell you to take a seat. They don’t ask what your problem is. The area is huge with perhaps 80+ seats to suffer in until your name is called to begin your journey into seeing a doctor. I got to the first level of check-in and passed out from lack of blood. That got me to the actual emergency area where there were doctors and nurses.

The doctors were hanging bags of “O-” blood and emptying it into my arm. They were panicked because I was losing blood faster than they could push new blood into my arm.

I was in a bed and I was filling up bedpans as fast as nurses could change them. At the same time I was drinking “go juice” by the gallon so the doctors could look down through my throat and up my colon. By the time they were figuring out what to do I had drunk 5 gallons of that “go Juice.”

I never got more than or even up to 2 hours of sleep at any one time. They were constantly poking my fingers to check blood sugar I think it was. That ran about once every hour.

All night long after I could finally get up and out of bed, I was up, dragging along the rolling tree of monitors into the bathroom. The “go juice” was doing its job, but they couldn’t do anything until my stool was as clear as water from a tap.

On the 8th day of tests and whatever, they took me to a room with very bright lights overhead. They were running scans and observing them. They found my artery from my heart that runs down through the lower extremities had opened and my blood was pumping into my guts. The doctors running the scans somehow put what they call clamps in the defective area and so far the clamps are okay. I can see a very small scar where the clamps were placed, but I have no idea of what they look like.

On the 9th day I was released and came home. Since then it’s been a roller coaster. Some days I was feeling fine and walked a lot, but lately I only got to the dumpster and my mailbox. That’s all I can do. I get along fine in my apartment.

One last thing, during the hospital days with people waking me up every hour or two, I have brought that home with me. I rarely sleep more than 2 or sometimes 1 hour without waking up. On a rare occasion I slept for a few hours when I was not feeling good.

There’s an old saying, “life is hell and then you die.” Some people have changed it to “life’s a bitch and then you die.”

I keep thinking I’m going to be 81 in another month and I’m still here and standing. I’m trying to figure out if God is keeping me alive for some purpose; then again He may just be punishing me for my many sins. I can go either way on that.

Brother Bill