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Happy Thanksgiving

MJF

Gunny Sergeant
Full Member
Minuteman
  • Jun 14, 2005
    597
    1,893
    N Idaho
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    Happy Thanksgiving you degenerates. Dinner is over and I’m sitting by the fire burning up a bunch of yard waste and enjoying a nice stiff nogtail

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    Happy Thanksgiving to all.

    July 4th of 2021, early in the morning, my wife fell in the kitchen. I was sound asleep. She grabbed a tin near by that we set potatoes and started banging it. Finally, I woke up. Long story slightly shorter, she broke her left femur near the top. They call it a hip fracture.

    We go to the ER in the next city (we live in a little city with 1 stop sign and 4 churches.) So, they admit her and schedule her for orthopedic surgery the next day. Taking blood, they find she is drastically low on soidum, potassium, and magnesium. They move her to ICU to adjust those levels and keep a close eye on it. Toward the end of the week, they would release her from that hospital because it is a trauma center, not a LTACH (Long Term Acute Care Hospital.)

    At the time, we had no insurance. 2 days before she would be released, she had a big seizure. They gave her a shot of Ativan. That tranq'd her. Then, her breathing got ragged. They ushered me to the waiting room while they entubated her and put in a NG (nasal-gastro) tube. Then, hooked her up to a ventilator. She was not conscious or responsive for weeks.

    In the meantime, I got us insurance through Healthcare.gov, which turned out to be mostly crap but what do you expend from Osama, I mean, Obama? Then, I got ahold of someone in the SSA and she got my wife's Medicare A started rectroactively to Jan 2021 but Medicare B would not start until July 2022. Well, that helped.

    Finally, her electrolytes got stable and they moved her to a regular room. Before that, she had changed to a tracheostomy. That is where they remove the entubation and then make a hole on her throat below her voice box (larynx) and put in a tube and put that on the ventilator.

    In that regular room, one night, she had a mucus blockage on her trache. And went Code Blue. That means no pulse. They inserted a new trache tube and performed chest compressions and her pulse started again. And it also collapsed her left lung. So, they had to put in a chest tube and changed her IV to a central line in the shoulder.

    I thank God for letting her live and having such awesome medical people at the Texoma Medical Center in Denison, Texas. The saying is true. Not all super heroes wear capes. Some of them wear scrubs.

    Eventually the NG tube would be replaced by a Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy (PEG) tube into her stomach. The reason is because these short tubes offer less chance of infections.

    TLDR, I thank God, by that name, that my wife is still alive.

    That is what I am thankful for.

    Love your family and be thankful for every day that you have with them.
     
    Did a bear try to break into your filing cabinet/smoker?

    No bear. And I really wish I could tell you that I'm such a smoker success that people are clawing to get at the goods.

    The scars came from dragging it out of the pickup with the skid steer, fighting it into the bucket then into the shop to modify. It's a fire proof filing cabinet, about an inch and a half of insulation all round, tips the scales at around 300 lbs empty.

    Today's run came out really well.

    Thank you,
    MrSmith
     
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