Thought | Ah, What a day

Time Flies by

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Like everyone, I get in the cycle of ‘I need to do this’, and it gets pushed back…… A LOT

So - let’s see if I can summarize this up in a few short paragraphs. Since Huricane Helene, WNC has been a freaking mess.
We are just getting to the point of having some of the places that I went to pretty often is being demolished. Are they are going to come back? I don’t know. Further more, the WNC area has been going threw what seems to be the end of days: flooding, forest fires, extreme storms and record breaking heat.

Hospital stays? 4 since Helene. I’m on a different medication regiment now, I’m hoping that this works out. Only problem is it appears to wreck havoc on my blood sugar.

You know, with all of the things I have been through, the day or two after the last hospital stay I saw something truely inspiring to me. A very visible double rainbow. Pictures are below:

When I looked up and saw this, something ’tingled’ inside of me, and my immediate thought was that god understands/gets me.
Odd thought, right?

Anyways, I’m hoping to get back in the rythm of writing blog posts.

‘Till next time, be kind to others!

10 Weeks of Hell - Surgery and more

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been thinking about writing about this for over a month. This morning I woke up and decided it was time to get it out in the air. To set the scene for this, imagine you are in severe pain with no way to understand what is happening.

What started it all

November 10, I woke up with severe pain from another intestinal blockage. This was after I went to bed on November 9th with no problems. I felt a little bad, but it was nothing abnormal. When I realized what was happening I called 911 to get transported to the hospital. They were able to get me partially easy, but after a few days, it wasn’t resolving itself. This wasn’t the normal case of these episodes, but a surgeon promised me that he would be able to fix what was happening. He told me that he was going to do it through laparoscopically, but after he got into the surgery, he had to open me up fully with a 5-6 inch vertical cut. The surgeon described my gut was in a bad state, and described the adhesions that he found as a ‘cobb-web of cobb-webs’.

Healing Journey

I woke up in severe pain on November 13th, and the only thing that really helped was Fentanyl. This was the only thing that would mostly get me at ease. While the side- effects of this drug are horrid, it got me somewhat easy. A few days later I was trying to get up and move, and I was able to make some progress with pain medications. They had me on foods within a few days as well, and everything seemed to be working ok. Little did I know that my intestinal tract was traumatized from the surgery, and when the intestinal tract is traumatized, it’s common for it to become ‘stunned’. This lasted until the first part of January, and I was in and out of hospitals from November 10th till January 17th. During this time, I was in Mission Hospital, Advent Health, CMC Main, and Mercy. I want to go into details about each of these experiences, and I will get to that later. Eventually, my intestines started working again, and my body would have changed beyond my own belief. During this time, I lost 80 lbs, and my diet was changed pretty dramatically. I’m now on mostly soft and liquidy foods.

Mission Hospital experience

While this hospital is the biggest hospital in Asheville, we need a better hospital here. The general surgery team was made up of multiple doctors, and it amazes me that some of them are very arrogant. I was on a track to get my body back to a working order, and the doctor on-call changed to the ‘head’ surgeon. This is when things went down hill fast. Soon as he got in charge again, he changed the method of treatment. While the prior surgeon had me on a path of recovery, he threw that out the window and went on his own path. This resulted in me having more issues, and the recovery was prolonged.

Advent Health

After my experiences at Mission hospital, I decided I needed to try another hospital. When I got there, they were able to get me in some sort of less pain state, and I saw the surgeon that did my surgery 16 years ago. He stated that the situation with me was to complicated, and I was needing better medical treatment than they could provide there. That’s when they were looking for another hospital that would accept me. After a few days, they said I was being transported back to Mission. This wasn’t going to happen cause I refused to go, but I had to sign out of the hospital against medical advice (AMA) if I didn’t want to go to Mission. This was a decision forced by the hospital staff at Advent Health. This is when mom was informed, and she drove from Charlotte to Advent Health to take me to Mercy hospital in Charlotte. When I signed out AMA, they rolled me out in a wheel chair without a mask to protect me from COVID into the lobby where there were COVID patients waiting for treatment. I was given 2 hours before they were going to leave me in the lobby waiting for a ride. In my opinion, this was the worst treatment I had during this time.

Mercy Hospital

When I got to Mercy, I was in severe pain, and they were able to get me back pretty quick due to all of the symptoms my body was exhibiting. I was given pain meds to get me somewhat easy, and then they started doing diagnosing of what exactly was happening. They admitted me within a few hours, and I was in a room 8-10 hours after I got to the ER. They done pretty much the same thing that Mission done; NG Tube then they done pain meds to combat the pain. Once I was able to eat again, it was pretty much the same thing that Mission did, clear liquids ramping up to solid foods. This was done a few times, and each time I seemed to handle it ok. When I got to mom’s house, things would go south quickly to where I would end up in the ER again. This happened until I was put on TPN and just a liquid diet. This allowed me to stay at my mom’s for several days. The first cleaning of the PICC line, it got infected. I ended back up in the ER with a high grade fever, and they administered several days of antibiotics. They kept me on TPN for a few days, and started me on a soft bite size diet which seemed to agree with me. They kept me until we made sure I was able to handle a few days of soft bite size meals.

CMC Main

I ended up going to this ER one time. This was an experience which was not pretty or fun. I was put in the ER triage, and ended up vomiting a lot of liquid up. Once again, I was given pain meds for the pain level I was under, and then I went through a series of waiting areas. We (mom and I) both caught COVID from this experience. This ultimately spread through mom’s house hold, my sick grandmother was there, and once they decided I was going to be admitted, I was transported back to Mercy. I ended up having COVID over Christmas, and this was the worst case of COVID I had. Ended up vomiting and diarrhea EVERYWHERE, and I ultimately ended up getting dehydrated due to all of the symptoms. I was then put in a room and wasn’t allowed to leave. Each time someone came into a room, they were covered head to toe with protective gear. This made me feel all sorts of dirty. It was amazing how that feeling spread through my mind and body. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.

Final Thoughts

While this experience was horrible and terrifying, it has changed me. When you are faced with what I went through, it makes you appreciate a lot of things differently. I have been told by several people that they didn’t think I was going to make it through this, which is odd to hear. While I understand where they are coming from, it’s still a shock. I have spared a lot of details of this, just to make things a bit easier to be heard. I sincerely hope that no one ever goes through what I have been through.

I will be writing another post soon about what is happening post hospital stays. With some details of what they have identified me of having.

COVID Theory

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I will start out by laying down the theory, and then I will move on to supplying some evidence of why I think this way.

Theory:

Through the COVID pandemic, there has an urge of mental health diseases in the US. With the release of COVID, whether it was intentional or unintentional, it has brought on a crushing increase of mental health issues, and this brings me to my theory. I think that COVID triggered a domino effect in the health of people around the world, and with people more worried about several aspects of life than what is happening in the bigger picture of things. This whole thing is to create a smoke screen to hide what is exactly is playing out in the world. Do I know the end goal? No. I don’t even know or have a theory who is pulling the strings. The dominos are just starting to drop.

Evidence:

News outlets:

A few months back I took about 3 hours and watched several news stations. The stations I picked were ABC, CNN, Fox, and Americas Voice. I have to say, I was shocked and disappointed at what I found. I was watching it on a Saturday morning from 11 to about 2pm What I found was varying information of what was happening with COVID from complete and totally left to complete and totally right. 99% of the information was contradictorily, so say this nice. With all of the misinformation, that’s what starts the smoke screen.

COVID Information:

While COVID is a new disease, there seems to be a lot of close mindedness around COVID. Doctors aren’t receptive to any aspect of this disease, and this can be seen if you look at any sort of COVID related forum/information outlet/etc. I have been reading people on Reddit for months, and there seems to be one conclusion, it sucks. Of course, this is an understatement. For people that has been suffering from things that are long term affects of having COVID and it seems to be so random. Makes me wonder, is there something that creates this virus do extreme things to some people, and then others, it does little to nothing. Myself, I suffer from anxiety and probably increased my GI issues.

More about the doctors being closeminded. I speak about doctors in general, and I attest to some doctors are completely the polar opposite to the ’normal' behavior. While these doctors are rare, and if you find one that you can work with, STICK WITH THEM. They are like golden nuggets. I have found one general doctor that has helped me in ways that I could never think her. I won’t name her, to respect her privacy. I do wish I could find a good place to research doctors, and this would be a service/website that is not persuaded by people throwing money at them.

Final Thoughts:

While I started this blog as a part of a type of therapy for me, and it has helped me a lot. I would like to let the people out there know that are suffering from long term effects from COVID. Keep your chin up, hopefully sometime soon that there will be a break through with treatments to help with these things you suffer from. Until then, if you are having thoughts of hurting yourself, please seek help. If you are in Asheville, NC, there are great IOP programs in town to help with some of this. While they are mainly for mental health items, suicidal thoughts and/or thoughts of hurting yourself could be helped as well. When I was in there, I found a new light in many things. I hope they will be able to help you.

Until next time, enjoy this ride which we call life.

Positions in Health and Finance

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s ben a while since I have put a post up, and I would like to talk about the things that have been on my mind.

Health position:

I select this topic first cause I have been going through more health challenges. In short, my gastro intestinal track doesn’t agree with me a lot of the times. I have concluded that I’m not able to figure out what is causing the issues, and I have been seeing several GI offices in the past years. This has been happening for the part 16+ years, and over the years, I have had almost every test executed on me during that time. There was one of the doctors that said I have had more than a million dollars worth of testing on me. Anyways, I have come to have less and less confidence in the health care system. I know they are doing their best, and I’m sure that my case isn’t the run of the mill type of case. I am going to be going under the procedure again this weekend, and my family has super hopeful that the outcome will at least shed more light on the problem.

You are probably thinking, what have I been dealing with? Well, it seems randomly, that my small bowel stops working. This results in a pseudo blockage in the small bowel. With this, I get transported to the hospital, and I go through the emergency room. The steps normally follow the same path:

Pain medication (usually morphine or something in that neighborhood)
X-Rays/CT scans
NG Tube
Complete GI rest

Doesn’t that sound like fun? I will go ahead and answer that, NO. That is a resounding NO. Along with all of the pain and discomfort that comes with all of this. There are the hospital/doctor/procedure bills that continue to pile up. In the first two years, I paid out $20K+. I can confidently say that this has hampered my income for many years, and my personal growth has also been altered, due to this. Imagine if you had something wrong with your body that struck randomly, and there doesn’t seem to be any way you can figure out when it will strike. How do you plan a trip? How about a vacation? How about just to see some friends? It has made me reconsider just about every aspect of my life.

So why do I don’t have a lot of faith in the health care system? Well, there are several family members that have conditions like mine. If you look at them, they seem fine, but what you don’t know about them would shock you. I’m not going to mention names, for the fact I want to respect their privacy. My eldest brother, Chris (no he’s not sick), has probably a lot more stories that would make you think more about the state of the healthcare system. I will be writing a blog post about him very soon.

Financial Position:

While, I have explained some about the healthcare bills, I want to elaborate. There have been several incidents that have BLOWN my mind. Let me tell you about two situations that I was presented with. Forgive me, I do not remember the dates of when these things happened, I will tell you what I remember.

Situation #1: I went into the hospital with the typical vomiting and extreme amounts of pain in my stomach. I was in there a 4-5 days. At the same time, a family friends went into the hospital with blood sugar problems. She was in the hospital for 6-7 days, while they were getting her blood sugar under control. I had a set of X-Rays, CT Scan, and a NG Tube. When I got out and started getting the bills; I calculated it up to close to $3K. When she was released, her bill was less than $500 (splitting the difference from my memory and my pops). I had insurance, and she had no insurance. Why do I bring this up? Well, the most significant reason is the simple fact that I have been told to have insurance or your healthcare bills will bury you(in simplest terms). How does this happen when I had insurance and she didn’t? I’m going to leave that to you to figure out. I would LOVE for an explanation.

Situation #2: I went into the hospital again, with the typical symptoms. I was in there this time for 5-6 days. I don’t remember any of the bills that came in, but I am notorious about not handling my mail in a timely fashion. When I saw a notice from a collection agency come in; I started talking to them to get a payment plan setup. After a year or so passes, I call them back asking why they are pinging my credit every month. The response I got, was that when I make a payment, they ding my credit each time. Even though I was handling the collections payments, and was keeping up with all of my other bills, my credit score was continually dropping. Yes, I did stay below the 20% threshold on my single credit card. I then did an in-depth look at my credit report. Went line by line to look into it further. I found nothing that stood out that would have been making my score drop. At this point, I ask for some advice from friends and family, and they were not understanding how the score was dropping either. Once I deduced that the collections firm was causing my credit score to drop, that’s when I asked them about the ding’ing my credit.

In summary:

There are things that I could have done better with my finances, but who doesn’t look back once in a while and doesn’t think this.

Looking forward:

I hope to be able to keep up with writing blog posts about things that I think about a lot. I’ve been working on crypto trading pretty heavily since I have been watching the markets pretty steadily. I hope to share some good news for everyone to trade by. Of course, this will not be a get rich type of thing; instead, think of it some of the things I have seen that seem to work for me.

Website Updates: Adding Links and PDF downloads

Sun, 06 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Among a lot of resources that I have gathered from the IOP Program at Mission, I have found most of them online. One of the best resources I have been informed of, getselfhelp.co.uk. I plan to have a list of PDF’s mirrored from there, to make sure everyone has access to it.

I want to bring your attention to one of the PDF’s that I found particularly useful for me. [PanicThoughtRecord](https://www.ahwaday.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/09/PanicThoughtRecord.pdf)

With the Panic Thought Record, I was able to track my thoughts on certain situations that had bothered me. Then, I was able to break down the situation and analyze it better using the worksheet. There is an example on the bottom to help form the flow for the worksheet.