It's been quite a while since I have had a chance to catch up on this, hospitals and doctors tend to interfere with the writing process. For those of you who don't know, I have been trying to get over a series of misfortunate interactions with doctors.

It all started simply enough, I had an abdominal hernia, for the fourth time, and my esteemed doctors refused to fix it. Now I won't tell you, they didn't have an excuse, they did, it just was not a real good one.

It seems that my heart has a tenancy sometimes to beat just a bit fast, say around two hundred beats per minute, and this has a tenancy to make them uneasy. I keep trying to tell them, that's not so serious, after all, before my ablation it used to go to four hundred. Thing is, they wanted to wait until it was an emergency before they fixed it.

Now I don't know about you, but to me; it seems a bit stupid to wait until things get worse; before fix you fix something. I am not a doctor, so, I suppose this stupid idea may have a basis in medical science. In aviation, however, letting a problem get worse before applying corrective action; is an invitation to disaster. That is an excellent way to crash and burn, quite literally.

Still, they waited till my hernia strangulated, meaning my little instance twisted allowing nothing could pass. If they did not fix this, I would die. Great idea boys and girls, meaning the doctors, wait until a patient is literally dying before you fix them. That simple surgery just became a lot more complex.

Now let's mix in one of the most incompetent emergency room doctors I have ever heard of. Most hospitals seem to put their most incompetent doctors in the emergency room. I have been taken to the emergency room five times in the last ten years. Two of those times I was sent home by the same, he shall remain unnamed, doctor.

The first time this incompetent doctor sent me home, the same ambulance crew, took me back to the hospital the next morning, at three in the morning. I spent six days in the hospital with walking phenomena. The second time, that same idiot, sent me home, over the objection of three other doctors. These doctors were calling me, before I got home, telling me to go back to the hospital admitting, bypassing the emergency room. This was for my third emergency surgery in two months.

I guess I should tell you more about that stupid emergency room! That hernia the doctors wanted to wait until it got to be an emergency, well it got to be an emergency. The ambulance crew halls me to the hospital and after only about half an hour of laying alone, in extreme pain, a nurse comes in and takes my blood pressure and temperature. She fills out the spaces on her forms for this information and leaves. Half an hour later someone comes in and connects me to the cardiac monitor.

Next comes the X-Ray machine. Someone in the emergency room decided it might not be a terrifically bright idea to try to move me go to the X-Ray room. I am  after all doubled up in pain. They bring a portable unit to the room I have been abandoned in. This gal want's to put a two foot by two and a half foot plastic and metal plate under my back. I had trouble just laying on the stupid gurney due to the pain I am in and here I am, having to sit up enough for this thing to be put under my back. Then things got worse. She wanted to put it down lower, so she could get another picture of my belly.

Now comes the medical assistant, not the doctor, and tells me, I have to have a CT-Scan. I don't know if you have ever been in the hospital being rolled through the halls on a gurney, but the wheels never seem to be perfectly round, there is always at least one wheel with a flat spot. Then there are the raised thresholds in the doors. Next, fun of fun, you get to move, from the gurney, to narrow sheet covered board which pushes you into the CT-Scan machine. The scanner is OK, the picket fence you have to lay on is what kills you.

Anyway, they finish the scan and roll me back to the room where I am promptly left for another half hour to hour laying on the gurney. At last they come in and give me a shot of Morphine. More time passes.

Finally, the assistant comes in and tells me that there is no surgeon on duty so they are going to send me to blanketed e blank hospital and I, recognizing the name of the one hospital that well people never leave, at least not without a sheet over their face, say no send me to Wilson and Jones. The assistant leaves and five minutes later the doctor comes in and tell me if I don't agree to go to blanketed e blank I am going to die withering in pain on this gurney.

I was still in pain, despite the Morphine, and, possibly confused from the drugs going into me through my IV, so I reluctantly said OK. I should have told that idiot where to go then called a friend to take me to Wilson and Jones.

Now keep in mind that this was an emergency surgery, I lay in the emergency room in Durant for a couple of hours, the ambulance takes almost forty-five minutes to take me to that blanked e blank hospital, to hell with it, it was TMC in Denison Texas. At TMC, they leave me, laying in a room, until around noon the next day. Finally, they roll me into surgery.

The surgeon cuts on me, puts mesh in my belly, sows me up, and, when I leave the hospital four days later, I felt like crap. Now, if you have ever had belly surgery, you know that the belly hurts a lot where the sides of the wound try to pull apart, but other than that you feel fine. I felt like wormed over crap.

A week later I have an appointment with the surgeon and the wound is still weeping fluid. I should tell you that this is my fourth hernia surgery and belly wounds don't do that for that period of time unless something is not right. He removes half the staples, slap's another bandage on it and sends me home with an appointment for the next week. The next week, feeling far worse and the wound still weeping to the point I change the bandage every six hours, he removes the rest of the staples and sends me home with an appointment for two weeks.

I go home then four days later, I realize that I have been siting on the couch for over twenty four hours without moving. Time to call the EMT's again. They come, take one look at me and start trying to stick an IV tube in my arm while they load me on the gurney. This time, the lights and sirens, are screaming while they run to the hospital. Less than an hour later I'm unconscious and in surgery to take out the infected mess put in by the first surgeon.

Evidently, there was a lot of infection because they had to leave my belly open. They just packed the hole with bandages, put a wire frame in the hole to keep the covering from going into the wound then stuffed me in intensive care. For the first time, in over two weeks, I start to feel better; despite having a six inch by four inch hole deeper than an inch in my belly.

They put foam in the wound and hook me up to a vacuum pump to keep the fluid from building up in the wound. After four days, I get to go home. This time I'm actually feeling better.

Now things certainly get interesting. Every day from Monday through Friday I go to something called the Wound Care Center. Twice a week, they pull out the old foam, clean the wound, measure it to make sure it's getting smaller, fill it with new foam and reconnect the pump. Every day they put me in a hyperbolic chamber for one and a half to two hours.

You would have fun in a hyperbolic chamber, not! You lay there, twiddling your thumbs or trying to watch TV while they pump pure oxygen into the thing at twice the atmospheric pressure. For those of you which remember their history, a pure oxygen environment was what killed the astronauts in Apollo One. Pure oxygen is an extremely powerful healing force which if properly used can make your wounds heal faster. Pure oxygen is one of the most dangerous things you will ever encounter in your life.

Most people don't know that any petroleum based product, such as deodorant, or perfume, or hair jell, or for you gal's out there, makeup; can, and often does, spontaneously combust when contacted with oxygen. Remember, oxygen is one of the things which pilots get to play with at high altitudes.

Lots of cloth can produce static electricity. It's called a spark. Sparks of electricity and oxygen tend to go boom. Even if, it does not go boom, I personally don't care to experience an oxygen fire first hand. All this means, no books, no Kindle's or Nook's, no phones; just you, the TV outside the plastic tube you are locked into, and your thumbs to twiddle.

Everything goes OK for about a month. I'm getting better, the hole in my belly is getting smaller, then over the weekend I start to feel bad. Monday morning, I go into Wound Care, and they start to change the foam in my belly. The nurse has it off and is across the room preparing things to put the new stuff on me when I lightly cough.

I mean, it was a nothing cough, almost like clearing your throat. Clear fluid fly's out of my belly, all the way across the room, and hits the cabinets on the other side of the examining room six feet away. To make a long story short, it's back to the hospital for a third surgery in a two month period.

This surgery is supposed to be a little thing. All they need to do is clear the pocket of fluid and close off the pocket. Yea right!

This is the third serious surgery I have in a two month period. The first surgery, second surgery to me, the doctor did not take out all of the mesh. I had been under the impression, based on what he had said, that all of it had been removed the first time. There is a serious infection in my belly. The source you ask? The mess which had been left in my belly.

I get to start over with the Wound Vac and Wound Care.

All this started around the Fourth of July and here it is two days before the beginning of November's Novel Writing Month challenge. My belly has a three-by-five piece of black foam on it, with a hose leading to a Wound Vac. The good news? The hole is no longer an inch and a half deep. It has filled in from the bottom up and now all I have to deal with is the surface hole, and hyperbolic five times a week.

I can't even write while I lay there, listening to the sound of pure oxygen blowing into the chamber. Twice a day I get to clear my ears from the pressure, once going up, and once going down. I hope I can keep up with my writing, and I wish, beyond all else, to git rid of this hole in my belly lousing that infernal pump hanging from my shoulder.