2008 hasn't started out all that good for good ole' Larry.Last Thursday evening at around 11 p.m. I started to feel slightly nauseous. It was bedtime anyway so we decided to go to bed. We had attended a little "Happy Hour" snack party in the clubhouse earlier in the evening and I was thinking that I would probably feel better in the morning.
>>>WRONG<<<By midnight I was violently vomiting and had chest pains across my lower rib cage. Thinking that I might be experiencing a heart attack we headed for the hospital, about ten miles from here. At Havasu emergency they quickly hook me up to an EKG machine and found that my heart was just fine. Then they gave me some medications to stop the vomiting and to reduce the pain and started doing tests. At first they thought that it could be my pancreas...but some machine that went "Beep" said no, it wasn't that. Eventually I got hooked up to every expensive machine in the hospital and after 18 hours in emergency they admitted me into the hospital with a rotten gall bladder and scheduled for immediate surgery.
By now it is was Saturday morning, I have no idea what happened to Friday.
But...there's always a but, they found out that my blood was too thin to operate as I have been taking Cumiden, a blood thinner, since my knee operation in June because of my *atrial fibrillation. *
(see my blog from Saturday, April 08, 2006) So they began pumping me full of Vitamin K, a blood thickener, to counteract the Cumiden.
And then, Saturday evening at about 6pm, I was good to go. Teddy had came back to the hospital with her camera on Saturday and here's what I looked like then!
Teddy said that In talking with the surgeon following the surgery he said that my gall bladder was completely rotten, swelled to six times normal size, surrounded with fat, and starting to get gangrenious.
Here's what I looked like then. Needless to say, even though I was pretty sore from the surgery, I felt much better, both mentally and physically. My surgeon, Dr. Rizzo told me that I could probably go home either Sunday evening or Monday morning.
>>>HURRAH<<<But...remember...there's always a but, my heart went into A-fib Sunday night and the cardiologist, Dr. Aliyar wouldn't release me till he got my heart stabilized.
So finally, it is now Tuesday the 8th and I came home to applause and hearty greetings here in The Havasu RV Resort this afternoon.
And one thing is certain.
I'll never have gall bladder problems again!
2008 hasn't started out all that good for good ole' Larry.
And then, Saturday evening at about 6pm, I was good to go. Teddy had came back to the hospital with her camera on Saturday and here's what I looked like then!
Here's what I looked like then. Needless to say, even though I was pretty sore from the surgery, I felt much better, both mentally and physically. My surgeon, Dr. Rizzo told me that I could probably go home either Sunday evening or Monday morning.
This was taken on 10/28 from rear of the park looking across the Colorado River.
...and then I turned around 180 degrees and caught this shot of the sunset reflecting off the clubhouse windows.
A couple of nights ago on Saturday evening 11/3 I shot this photo through the doorway of our trailer.
On the other hand, the moon can be quite spectacular too, especially when full as it was on 10/25 when I got this shot of the moon rising over Arizona's Hulalapai Mountain chain across the road from our RV Park.
This is what it looked like a few minutes later.
Here we are at our winter home in Lake Havasu City, AZ. Our local address until April will be:
Before takeoff they start the plane in this starting block for a preflight controls check.
And Off We Go...
