Thanks for your concerns, friends!

I guess Joe was the only one I grumbled to about it, but back on the first I had to have some of my internal plumbing reorganized, kind of like what he had to have done recently. They scrapped 18 inches of my colon in the process. Whoever said gettin' old ain't for sissies wasn't lying!

If the surgery wasn't bad enough, the indignities they put a guy through at a hospital are enough to tempt him to just go ahead on and die!

I think maybe I didn't handle it too well. In fact, I might not be invited back next time. I've been hospitalized before for various problems (usually self-inflicted) and this time I probably gave some of the staff some real entertainment. I'm allergic to a couple of medications, penicillin and codeine based pain killers. They always ask you about that. Well, I told them about the penicillin but I forgot about the pain killer and, man, that stuff really messes with my head!

They doped me up good and tucked me in bed (supposedly for the night) and left. A couple of hours later I decided that it was very important that I get up and go somewhere else. I managed to get that gown thing off and was trying to get unhooked from the IV tree and the catheter tube when the lights came on. I found myself standing in the center of a circle of nurses, naked as a jaybird, lost as a goose, not knowing where I was, and wondering just how the hell I had gotten myself into a situation like that.

I'm told it wasn't a pretty sight.

Soooooo .... you know what I did? Two hours later I got up and did the same thing AGAIN!

I don't think I'm going to take any more of that kind of medicine.

Again thanks for being interested. It's looking more and more like I will survive in spite of myself.


Jim