For a long time I had felt I wasn’t doing the “Greensboro Is Talking” domain justice.

It had devolved into a personal blog of sorts and had strayed far from it’s original direction.  It was a frustrating situation in that there were personal things that didn’t quite seem to fit on GIT that I wanted to blog about, but didn’t.  And there were also some things put up that probably shouldn’t have been.

Subsequently,  I would have to say that when I royally screwed up and deleted the GIT database by accident, I wasn’t too distressed.  I have backup copies of the database that I’m having some issues with in terms of re-installing, but honestly, I just haven’t felt like monkeying around with it to get it to work.  I’d like to get it back online eventually.  But I’m in no hurry at the moment.  I’ve even considered the possibility of taking the site in a new direction but haven’t really given it a lot of thought.  Suggestions are welcome, of course.

These past few months of not blogging locally have been somewhat of a welcome respite.  (I say “locally” because I still do blog a couple times a week on a bigger scale at the VFW WebCOM Network where I serve as sort of a “defacto” blogmaster for the 10,000 blog organizational network.)  I’ll have to admit, I was burned out mentally and physically…but more on that in a moment.

So am I back in the saddle again?  Sort of.  I can’t promise I’ll be blogging here every day.  I’m still on a crazy home and travel schedule.  But I think this blog will give me a little more freedom to post about things in my life that may or may not have anything to do with Greensboro.  You may see pics from the places I’m traveling to, videos of cool or crazy stuff I’ve seen along the way, or just straight up commentary about anything that might be crossing my mind.  It could be tech-related, it could be about movies I’ve seen, restaurant reviews or any other piece of crap that happens to be floating through my head at the moment.  Standards?  I’ll have few if any.  This one is going to be pretty much anything goes.  You get the idea.

Oh, and not to forget about the “physically worn out” part from above.  Some of you may know about this, most of you don’t.  I was out of the game for a little while in May.  I spent 16 days as a guest at Moses Cone Hospital over two different, but related, stays.  You see, I spent a lot of time traveling during March and April.  There were a lot of long rides in the car and a fair number of long and short flights.  At one point during the month of April, I got a cramp in my leg.  You know the kind, it was one of those night cramps that has you going from deep sleep to screaming in pain in 2 seconds flat.  Only thing was, it didn’t entirely go away for over a week.  It was just there, nagging at me while I was in Las Vegas on business for a week.  After I got home, it went away and I didn’t give it another thought.

Two weeks later, something didn’t seem quite right.  Michelle (my girlfriend) and I had just gotten back from a trip back to Wisconsin for a wedding in the family and I started to notice a little pain in my side.  I didn’t pay much attention at first, but then it got worse.  I started to think maybe it was my appendix acting up.  But then the pain moved sort of up and around my back and chest.  It finally settled as full-blown chest pains.  As anyone can tell you…that’s not good.  So it was off to the emergency room.

A quick EKG found no irregularities.  So it wasn’t a heart attack…which is good.  A chest x-ray also turned up nothing.  Which is also good.  Then came the CT scan.  Not so good.  Multiple blood clots aka Pulmonary Embolism’s or PE’s for short, in each lung.  A couple days in the hospital getting adjusted to and acquanted with Heparin, Cumadin and Lovenox and I was sent home.  Btw, they think the cramp in my leg was where the clots originated.

Four days later, I was right back at the ER with chest pains again.  Another round of EKG, chest x-ray and CT scans found two brand new clots in the lungs.  Oh what fun! More blood thinners!  Yay!  But this time the folks at Moses Cone upped the ante.  They decided to install an Inferior Vena Cava filter.

Now, do you know what happens when you make an incision into someone’s jugular when they are on blood thinners?  That’s right!  They bleed.  The surgery was at around Noon on a Friday.  Around 6PM that night, the incision started to bleed.  Profusely.  Oh, the nurses and staff were able to get it to stop for short periods of time…at one point around midnight, I was even able to nod off to sleep for a while.  But then I woke up around 1:30 in a huge pool of my own blood.  You know, they just don’t like seeing that happen when you’re in a hospital.  They started pumping me full of vitamin K, which thickens the blood, and plasma.  Finally at around 9 AM Saturday morning, the bleeding stopped and stayed stopped…for the most part.

By that evening, they were pumping the blood thinners back into me.  I then spent the next full week in bed trying to get the thinner levels to go back up to a point where they could release me.   (Shout outs are in order to the nursing staffs in the heart unit and later the orthopedic unit where they found an empty bed for me…you guys rock!)

That was May in a nutshell.  The rest of the summer so far has been spent trying to maintain the correct levels of the blood thinners.  Through some trial and error, it seems we’ve found a decent system for getting the right amounts.  But we’ll find out more on that tomorrow.  It’s been the prescribed 4 weeks so we’ll see how I’ve done.  I’m still above ground…so that’s a good sign…for starters. 🙂

The travel schedule has resumed and like a bad Mummy III movie, the adventure continues. 🙂