Back Again!

(This is an unpublished account of my medical problems in 2012 and 2013.  Skip it unless you want to hear a boring story.  However, members of my family should read it, because of the hereditary information.)


I'm back from fighting leg wounds that  would not heal! After spending a while at the local hospital's wound care facility.. it was decided that I would need other eyes to look at my condition and try to figure out  why I had a constant 10+ pain level, even with the usual amount  of  pain killers given to people with bad wounds.  So, off I went to the very best hospital in the  world (look it up)..  Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.



Their first line of attack was to eliminate the constant pain.. which was accomplished with a massive combination of narcotics, high density pain patches and other medications.  Once done, they were able to redo all of my prior tests and discovered that the blood going down my legs, was not being returned.. a condition that I discovered was one of my mother's late-life conditions... and is hereditary. 



An ablation procedure was prescribed on one of  my legs.. that's cauterization of clogged veins.. this was a traumatic experience for me because they  treated it as a major procedure rather than a relatively minor procedure that  it normally is and gave me serious sedation. My mind did not appreciate the drugs that were applied to keep me sedated and I had a major nightmare type of waking up... I imagined I was in a coffin and a roomful of people were peering down at  me and talking.  It was so real I had the fun of reliving it (so to speak) over and over for a couple of weeks.



Anyway, I refused to have the second leg done soon... and my  major wound care doctor agreed with me and said that I was  too old a dude anyway to have the second leg done, but that would not be necessary as long as I did my post-op exercises and such for the rest of my life... this includes the squeezing of my legs by big blue coverings for two hours each day.. and the wearing of tight stockings almost all of the  time.



Once my leg condition cleared up,  I was very happy and felt good.. however, now I had to go through a couple of months of major withdrawal symptoms from all of the drugs I had become used to.   You've heard of these symptoms... so I'm not going to mention them here.. suffice it to say, I was not the nice person I normally am during that time!