Words Written, but Not Shared

It might look like I haven’t written any entries for the entire month of February, but that is not correct. I wrote lots of words – I just didn’t share them here.

Right at the end of January I suffered one of the potential side effects of my ankle surgery: a pulmonary embolism. I spent a few days in the hospital and had radiological intervention surgery which fixed things. So, I wrote about that; I wrote about my time in the emergency room; and I wrote about the team of doctors, nurses, mechanics, vampires, and pit crew that took care of me. I wrote about the food in the hospital (overall, not bad). Plus, I wrote about pain and the pharmacological cures for pain which didn’t really work for me.

I wrote four entries, two of which were over a thousand words, but when it came time to publish each one of them, I demurred. It wasn’t that I really cared who knew that my ambulance driver’s name was Astrid, or that I had one vampire so good she could draw blood at 2 AM and not wake me up. I guess overall; I was revealing things that were too mundane. Sure, I guess if you were about to undergo the procedure yourself you might enjoy hearing what somebody else went through, but aside from that does anybody really need to read such things? Actually, the perfect place for such things would’ve been in a journal.

Several times during my life I attempted to keep a journal and would usually get through the first month or two before I gave it up. Those attempts have left me with brief glimpses into periods of my life during middle school, my first year of college, and my first overseas assignment in the Air Force. None of which connect anywhere else. This blog is the closest I’ve gotten to documenting of my life for long period. Even this doesn’t cover everything that is going on, just the high-points that I feel like sharing. When I read back over the entries I wrote for February, I didn’t see much difference between them and scribbles in one of several blank notebooks I picked up the Waldenbooks. Not something I would want to inflict on anyone.

The short version is that I survived the embolism with no permanent damage. The procedure being used at the hospital was pioneered during COVID and the team that performed it gained massive amounts of experience during that time. It led to the procedure being smooth for me and effective. Fortunately, I had a doctor who understood that pain need to be managed and kept trying different medications until he found one that was effective. Considering I was at an eight on the scale of ten for most of the first two days, I’m glad he kept trying. 

Now you know the reason for the blank that was February 2023, and I’ll now return to writing something of interest on a weekly basis. Well, at least interesting to me. As for all those words I wrote and didn’t publish here, I will print them out and stick them into one of those notebooks from my younger days. Who knows, maybe someday the wind up in a museum.

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