So it has been 1 year since my little medical incident last year and I’m still ticking.  As rough as it was in the beginning I’m a little surprised I made it.  But of course I’m very glad I’m still here.  I’m still on a couple medications and likely will be for a long while.  And I still have another follow up test to do some time.  But other than that – all is back to normalish.  My scar has faded well, of course it is noticeable but it hides well enough.

And now off to a nice dinner to celebrate making it one year.  Have a good evening.

In my last post obviously something bad happened on August 20th, and it did.  I woke up early that morning with a horrible upset stomach.  I’ll try to keep this story short and leave out the graphic details as much as possible.  So that morning I did get sick pretty fast, and it was all blood.  And lots of it.  I took my blood pressure (not sure why I thought to do this or even took the time to do it) and it was very low.  I ended up calling 911 to have an ambulance take me to the Hospital.  I passed out on the way there briefly so it is a good thing I called them.

Once in the ER they gave me some blood and transferred me to the ICU to wait until a surgeon could scope my stomach and look for any bleeding.  That afternoon I went in for the scope.  That is all I remember.  What I’m told happened is that during the scope my stomach was all good.  They then went in to my small intestine and found something huge that they thought was a tumor.  Details are fuzzy here.  Something happened and the large thing started bleeding bad.  I know they had to work on me for a while to get me stable, whatever that means.  And then a wonderful surgeon went in and fixed what actually was a massive bleeding ulcer.  The ulcer had dug its way in to a blood vessel which obviously caused massive bleeding.  I now have a fair bit of permanent silk sutures on that vessel to protect it while the ulcer heals.

They kept me knocked out the rest of that day and part of the following day.  When they woke me up I came to with a breathing tube in place (and many other tubes I would soon find out) and the first thing I saw was my parents standing beside me.  Both of them.  My mother had come over from Indiana as soon as I went in to the Hospital, but my Dad should have been at home.  It is a 4 hour drive.  My brain figured all this out immediately and that is what told me something bad had happened.  I didn’t know what, but all I knew is if both Mom and Dad were there, bad things happened.  And I was right, bad things did happen and I was very lucky to be alive.  They used 25 units of blood working on me.  So I bled out a few times over since the average male body only holds about 8 units I’m told.

A few days later I was transferred to a normal room.  I ended up spending about 2 weeks in the hospital and then it has taken a couple of months more at home to really heal up so that I can eat normally again.  I lost a ton of weight (hey, I wanted to diet anyway) and lost a lot of energy.  But I’m doing very well now.  Back on my bike riding too!

I don’t have the energy to write anything here right now, but this is a placeholder to remind me to share my story.  Since I am typing, I didn’t stay down – some incredibly talented surgeons saved my life.

–Mark

I’ve known it was time to get off the couch and get some exercise for a while.  And had every intention of making heavy use of the mountain bike trails near me.  However with my new medical condition, offroad riding is not really recommended.  Thus, time to switch to road riding.  I had been dragging my good old Trek mountain bike around local county roads for a while but finally decided to pull the trigger on a real road bike.  Wow, what a difference.  I have 2 awesome neighbors that are avid riders so that will certainly help with motivation to ride.  So hopefully my next post will be about being in better shape and putting on some real miles.

Oh, here is my new ride:

With the larger yard, and the addition of more stuff it is time to gain some storage. Yes, I know I have a 3 car garage and a full basement. That’s beside the point. So, shed time.

On a somewhat related topic, I’ve been using TurboCAD for the Mac. Since I’m mid-conversion to running all Macs I figured now would be a good time to find a decent CAD package for OSX. After running and teaching with AutoCAD for so long, it is hard to retrain myself for a different design paradigm. But TurboCAD Mac is pretty nice. I’m not even close to being as efficient as I used to be, but that’s fine. I’m only drawing a shed right now.

Update: Project Shed is going slow, but progressing. Pictures are up at http://www.managedinsanity.com/gallery/v/shed/