In July of 2020, I woke up with my heart racing. My pulse rate was over 170. I thought I was having a heart problem, so my wife called an ambulance for me. I remember walking to the ambulance and getting strapped in, but that was the last memory I had until days later.

I vaguely remember some doctors talking to me about how they were treating me, but I think I was heavily drugged and not much made any sense. I laid there for a week before they decided to perform surgery.

My next memory was waking up in the ICU begging for water, but of course, they would not give me any. My wife visited me in the ICU, and I kept asking her why I was strapped down and unable to lift my arms or legs. She insisted I was not strapped down, so I was paralyzed. I don’t know how long I was there, but the next memory I have is a surgeon calling me on the telephone, and a nurse holding the phone for me so I could hear. He told me I had to have another surgery or I would die that night. I refused, and told him “I’m OK with that”. I did not want to live out the rest of my days as a paraplegic. I also found out at that point that they had removed a large portion of my large intestine and performed a colostomy.

So they assigned me to hospice. I don’t know how long I was there, but obviously, I did not die. Eventually, I was transferred to a rehab hospital, and they were sure I would not survive either. However, I am a stubborn old coot, and hung on. At that time, my wife was not allowed to visit me because of the covid scam. But we could do facetime at least. One night I noticed a large swelling on my pelvic bone, and showed my wife who then called up the nursing staff and told them I needed to have that checked out. At first they said it was an old hernia, which I new wasn’t true, and finally they sent me back to the hospital where they tried to reduce my non-existent hernia. Finally they CT scanned me and determined that I had a huge pool of pus in my abdomen. They inserted drains, and removed over a liter of pus and started to treat me with antibiotics. That’s when I started to get better and the nursing staff no longer felt I would die soon. I think I was in rehab for about a month and then came home in a wheel chair.  After 3 years, I still cannot walk very well, with balance issues and weak legs, and overall loss of strength.

While I was under the care of St. Lukes hospital, according to my hospital records, I suffered 24 blood clots in my legs, 3 pulmonary embolisms, a heart attack, and a stroke which caused damage to my optic nerves, and gangrene in my fingers.  The doctors were considering amputating my fingers, but luckily for me, this did not happen.  I did lose parts of my finger tips though.

While I don’t remember much of what happened to me, my wife told me far more details than my memories provided.  However one memory I do have from either the ICU  or hospice (not sure where I was at the time) is interesting.  I was suddenly outside of my body looking at it while 12 spirits were gathered around it discussing what to do with me.  They did not communicate directly with me, they just talked among themselves.  They were all dressed identically in brown robes and were slightly transparent.  Was this a hallucination?  I have no way to tell.

As hard as all that was on me, it was far harder on my dear wife.  The doctors called her and told her on four different occasions that I was going to die that night.  The emotional strain on her must have been tremendous.

The aftermath of this fiasco is that I am no longer me.  I used to be an independent person capable of almost anything I wanted to do.  I ran an electronics business, I played in a local band, I built model engines in my machine shop, I took care of my property, and was generally happy with life.  Now, I have no strength to do physical things, can’t see well enough to read books, have constant pain from the colostomy, can’t play my pedal steel guitar anymore.  But the worst is that I am no longer independent because of the colostomy.

I cannot change the colostomy appliance my self and I am not free to leave the house whenever I want.  The colostomy is too unpredictable, and too unreliable.   If I have to go somewhere for an appointment, I have to not eat anything the day before, so my digestive tract is as empty as possible.  Even then, I dread going away for even short amounts of time because I have had too many ‘accidents’ with it.  I am a prisoner to it.

I am fairly sure all of this was caused by a colonoscopy which I had about a week before this started.  I believe the doctor punctured my colon during the procedure.  Can I prove that? No.  But it seems highly likely to me.