Slacker Blogger

Well my friends and family . . . all 4 of you . . . you may be wondering why I use these three dots so often . . . but you might also be thinking . . . "Why the heck hasn't this guy posted on his blog lately?"

I bring you the answer with promises of many posts to come. You see . . . (there they are again!) . . . I was scheduled for some minor surgery because my bladder hates me . . . thanks to that whole broken back thing. So, I opted for the suprapubic catheter. Anyway, simple outpatient surgery with a couple days rest . . . good to go!

Not so fast there wheels. I guess I overdid it, because another "benefit" of my spinaly-chord-parts-not-communicatin-so well is autonomic dysreflexia. Except, I had very severe episodes of these reactions . . . so bad in fact, that I am convinced I had a few very minor strokes. I would feel my abdomen/bladder spasm and then the pain would come shooting up my neck and into my brain. I could feel the blood pounding so hard that I could not see, hear or speak hardly at all. These would last anywhere from 2 minutes to 20 minutes at it's worst.

So, this earned me a trip to the E.R. which was useless. They just want to kill the pain and send you home. So, they said follow up with your primary care doc, which I did. Unfortunately, he could not see me until later that day, so I suffered through quite a few episodes. But, he did know what I was going through and was familiar with sci's and the dysreflexia. He got me admitted to the hospital where I had my surgery (which went fine by the way . . . they didn't do anything wrong). I had to wait a couple of hours to get in my room, which seemed like forever when you are wondering if you can make it through the next episode, which could be any minute. It took a couple days of the good stuff . . . muscle relaxants, narcotics, opiates, etc. and some serious rest. I was finally released from the hospital, and only had two episodes after I got home. Then, I pretty much slept for three days.

My two days off from teaching turned in to two weeks. I went back to work yesterday, which was tiring but it was good to be back. My school loved on me with cards, cash, gift certificates, a plant . . . but the best gift of all was hearing from junior high kids that said that they really missed their teacher (even if part of it was they just don't like substitute teachers!).