I'm back!

It's good to be back.

The weekend gave me something of a taste of what it's like to be alone, with one's mortality doing a little cakewalk out there in front of your imagination.

I wasn't really alone, of course. Drew was around, as were Shannon and Huntur. And although Galina isn't here, knowing that she exists and cares for me takes quite a bit of the edge off the loneliness.

I got to the hospital - Mercy Medical Center in Durango - a little after 8 pm. They immediately took some blood, put me on oxygen, did an EKG, and sprayed some nitroglicerin under my tongue. A cuff around my right bicep inflated itself every 15 minutes to measure my blood pressure.

The doctor came by at midnight and we talked. After she left, I remained in the ER, waiting to be taken upstairs to a room. That occurred around 1:30 am. By the time I was fully wired, poked, prodded, sampled, resampled, and interviewed, it was 2:30. I slept, but was awakened at 4 to allow the nurse to grab my vital signs, and again at 7 or so for breakfast and for another blood draw.

Saturday went by slowly. I pretty much stayed in bed and tried to watch TV (half the screen was invisible because of a reflection from the window). I supposed I could have asked the staff to lower a blind or turn the screen, but frankly, I really didn't give a damn. I was hoping the wheels would move fast enough for me to be out of there by evening. It was not to be.

Somewhere around noon, I was taken downstairs for an echocardiogram (an ultrasound examination of the heart). I seem to recall having one of those at St. John Cristus in 1997, but that examination wasn't very productive. The one in Durango even provided a view of blood flow, depicted in a manner similar to Doppler weather broadcasts.

At around 3 pm, the doc came by to tell me what was going on, which I am still trying to make sense of. The long and short of it was that I was going to stay one more night while folks kept track of how I responded to some medication, and what the oxygen level in my blood looked like while I was sleeping.

If everything went well, I'd be out Sunday with prescriptions for some new, funny-sounding medicine to take, along with - as it turns out - a device designed to feed me oxygen at night.

My take on this (and I am not a doctor, so the following may be simply horse puckey): I must do what it takes to take load off my heart muscle. The nasty part about myocarditis is that the disease forces the heart to work harder, which further inflames the heart, causing it to work less efficiently, which forces the heart to work harder, etc.

I need to drop some pounds, too. So, I am definitely going along with the program.

* * *Seeing Huntur at the hospital really hit me hard, as well. My grandfather - the one I heard about all though my childhood - died about the time I was Huntur's age. And all through my childhood, I had an intense curiosity about that man, of whom I have a dim, dull memory from infancy (or think I do). Unlike the case with my father, who at least left some written record of himself in the form of a handful of manuscripts and letters, I have next to nothing that tells me about my grandfather.

There are times when I wonder what kinds of things he might have told me, or taught me, if there had been time.

So you see, besides the usual reasons for not wanting to exit this veil of tears anytime soon, there is the one added and acute reason of wanting to make a difference in my granddaughter's life.

Actually, I think it goes beyond that, but that's a subject for another post.

The point is: nobody can say I'm not motivated to get right with my health.

Cheers...