Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Personal Sharing and Blogs

I've never been a fan of unnecessary or very private information sharing on Web Logs.

It seems to me that the way to do it is to pick a topic or theme and just build on it. If it is a personal chronicle of some sort just stick to logging pertinent stuff. If you are serious that is.

In my own case ... I find that I get pretty bored with limitations of any sort and so I never tried to contain or restrict the topics I post on. As time goes on my interests evolve and change so it follows that the content and topics in this blog change. It's all pretty random and unstructured, but I like it that way.

In the matter of personal life events I've never been too keen on talking about myself because it just shouldn't matter. In my personal life I treat a lot of things as either "category=my business" or "category=something I want you to know". In the blogging world my approach is basically that there are things I see that deserve some commentary and I want people to know about them.

This does not mean that I expect everyone to care or even anyone for that matter.

So it follows that with my low (non existent) expectations on anyone who chooses to read my thoughts or share the materials I link to, I never had any inclination to share much in the way of personal stories.

Until now. For some reason I've gotten the urge to offer some things that have made a profound difference in my own life.

So ...

It has been about two years since I found out that I had cancer. There are two pertinent things about this. First, that I had to have surgery as soon as possible to assess the nature and extent of the cancer and subsequently that I had little hope of a happy outcome.

The surgery I had nearly killed me. Without going into gory detail, the plan was that I would go under four hours to have my abdomen opened and my liver exposed for biopsy and possible hepatectomy at the site of the tumor. As it turned out the cancer could not be safely removed. I did however get the benefit of having my moribund gallbladder removed. The story of that could consume pages and I don't see any point at this time of going down that road.

My post surgery expectations were that I'd be in post surgery ICU recovery about 24 hours and then 10 days or so of observation before going home. The reality was something quite different.

What happened was that I woke up later in the evening apparently feeling pretty good, reading some magazines and watching TV. I had visitors that night and slept until the next morning. In the morning I had the TV on and then I passed out and stopped breathing. Apparently I had about ten minutes to live before my heart started pumping properly and I stabilized. At that point I was wheeled into emergency surgery where they opened me up to check for bleeds or other damage. There was nothing found and  they stitched me up inside and shot another 40 staples into my abdomen.

This is where things got weird.

I went into a coma. There was no waking me out of it and everyone was (so I was told) having a fit about what to do. There were several attempts to wake me up that were aborted because I was reacting almost violently with extremely high blood pressure and heart rate. This scared the staff and they put me back under to prevent me from possibly having a stroke. Personally I've felt this was a CYA action because I remember when I was waking up and hearing the instructions, first to me to open my eyes then to the nurse to shut down the stimulant and shoot me with sedative.

Over the course of seven days this was repeated 3 times and each time it was the same thing. I was told later by a doctor that I had clocked him in the jaw during the second effort to bring me out of the comma. I guess that was why I was in restraints when I eventually did come out. At the end of the week the plan had changed to keeping me under (or simply not bothering to wake me up) and to wait out the coma or let me vegetate.

Lucky for me, my wife had other ideas.

To be continued...

OMMAG


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4 Comments:

Anonymous Talnik said...

holy cats, OMMAG, good luck with everything

12/06/2014 3:43 p.m.  
Blogger OMMAG said...

Thanks.

I'm done with two years of cancer treatment now and just living with it. I'm actually starting to feel better now with the drugs gone from my system.

Maybe there is something to write about in this! I have to organize my thoughts around it all.

12/07/2014 10:26 a.m.  
Blogger Bob's Blog said...

I'll look forward to reading your thoughts. Glad you're feeling better!

7/11/2015 10:00 p.m.  
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1/10/2019 12:53 a.m.  

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