OT: Brushes With The Reaper (per McBrady's request)

From another thread:

Greg Evans wrote:

Happy birthday Nick. My only regret is that I didn't get to know you better while you were among the living.

Maybe later I'll regale you all with the tale of my own recent
brush with the Reaper. Perhaps.

Go for it. It's a Dark Week.


First, forgive the length of this post, brevity is not my forté.

Hopefully this can serve as a cautionary tale for someone else out
there. As some of you may or may not know I work in group home with
four "adults with intellectual disabilities" (that's the latest PC
term, anyway). I work 3rd shift Fri/Sat/Sun 14/14/12 hours.

Now just a bit more setup. I have an undiagnosed (so far) bleeding
disorder, generally not an issue, unless I'm subjected to some sort
of trauma. Sometime back I saw a "Dr." for a stiff, very sore, and
inflamed big toe. When I got home with my prescription of Naproxen
(an NSAID) I immediately realized that I'm not supposed to take
those, and so, I didn't.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. The toe is flaring up again, and
tylenol proves to be ineffective. Naturally I remember the Naproxen
and decide to give it a try. It works and I'm thinking that 500mg
once or twice a day, a few days a week should be fine.

So, flash forward to this past Sunday night/Monday morning:
I've just had a slice of apple pie and my toe is starting to really
hurt again, so I take another (my second of the day) Naproxen.
I'll try to keep what came next as in-offensive as possible.

My bowels began grumbling that they needed to be moved, so I did.
Looking into the bowl when I saw that one end of the stool (sorry)
was composed of the stereotypical 'old coffee grounds' I said to my
self, "Oh, that's not good."

I'm thinking at that point that I'd be ok to finish my shift and can
worry about it later.

Within minutes I began to realize that I had miscalculated.

After evacuating several gushers of increasingly bright-red blood
I knew I was in serious trouble and needed to call someone to take
over for me, and maybe an ambulance. The problem was; at this point
I couldn't stand without blacking out and didn't have a phone
within reach.

Finally during a break in the action, I crawl to a phone, get my
boss's # and make the call, downplaying the situation not wishing
to alarm her. A few minutes later as my hold on consciousness grew
extremely tenuous I called back telling her "This is really bad, I'm
going to have to call an ambulance."

The ambulance arrived, followed immediately by my boss, and it was
off to the ER. I won't bore you with my tales of the rampant, and
apparently institutionalized incompetence I witnessed in the ER.

The bleeding stopped on its own by the time I'd been in the ER for
a bit. They did all sorts of tests, revealing nothing, gave me two
units of blood, all sorts of fluids and anti-bioticcs and such and
they were even quite generous with the Morphine. They want to give
me a chance to heal before they do any scope-work. So I have that
to look forward to.

So... in summation. Tuesday afternoon (I arrived at the hospital
around 5:30AM Monday) they finally let me eat, then Tuesday I was
released, just in time to miss out on voting.

Caldonia (my cat) was overjoyed to see me, I've already taken next
weekend off from work, and I'm still exhausted.

I apologize for my long-winded rant... blame McBrady.

Greg, glad to be among the living
--
=========================================================
"A computer once beat me at chess,
but it was no match for me at kick boxing."

(Emo Phillips)
---------------------------------------------------------
My Photos-
http://www.gsevans.com/photography/

My Blog-
http://www.gsevans.com/blog/

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Hero myth=ToE
    ... > anything the refutes their beloved doctrine of ever-changing ToE, ... > read Propp's Morphology of a Folk Tale and Landau. ... Legal objections to a science. ... the same thing as naturalistc philosophy. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Hero myth=ToE
    ... > anything the refutes their beloved doctrine of ever-changing ToE, ... Nobody has presented anything that refutes it yet. ... > read Propp's Morphology of a Folk Tale and Landau. ... > and much more of a fairy tale than ID. ...
    (talk.origins)
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  • Re: Roger
    ... QuiGon wrote: ... A tale, not being a living thing with a mind, cannot have a state of mind. ... The tale may have been incredible, but it's the listener who is incredulous. ...
    (alt.sports.baseball.bos-redsox)
  • Re: Roger
    ... "Jeff Schwab" wrote in message ... tale, not being a living thing with a mind, cannot have a state of mind. ... The tale may have been incredible, but it's the listener who is incredulous. ...
    (alt.sports.baseball.bos-redsox)