I'm Back!!

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Let's try this again. I've been trying to post this for several days now, but I keep loosing and rerighting it. Last time I lost it when I tried to do a spell check so please excuse my spelling errors, I am not going to run the spell checker this time.

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I want to thank everyone who sent me a note ,card, flower, or baloon while I was in the hospital. It was a big help to me to be able to look at the wall and see all of the things that people had sent. This is a picture of about half of them up on the wall in my hospital room.

The purple papers are the "Cheer-o-grams". A bunch of kids in Brad's class made cards and sent them in as well. Jake, on the other hand, managed to convince his teachers that due to the stress of having his father in the hospital, he shouldn't get any homework. And it worked. His teachers didn't assign him any homework the whole time I was ill. I think he is going to grow up to be a car salesman or a loan shark.

I've been trying to get things straight in my head about what happened, but it hasen't been easy. I can't remember anything after about 1am, that day. The doctors tell me that I injested a large ammount of Ethylene Glycol. At work, we mix diamond powder with ethylene glycol and use it to polish calcium floride. CaF2 is a crystal that is used to make some optics. What bothers me is when I think about it logicly, I can't see any way that it could have been an accident. On the other hand, I have no memory of doing it or even of my mental/emotional state at the time. It is perplexing. I never thought I was capable of anything so stupid. But apparently I am.

The way it plays out in my head is like this. I remember being outside with Tommy (friend at work) and him giving me a bag of his son's old clothes. Then the very next moment, I was having some very strange, very vivid dreams. At least I think most of them were dreams. Then it seems like I was going in and out of conciousness. I can remember small "episodes", like wakeing up in the night and trying to get out of bed. Only to be stopped by my PCT (personal care technition, AKA baby sitter). I remember trying to sit up in bed while in dyalisis, and being pushed back down by my PCT and two nurces. I remember thinking I was in Quito, Equidor, and all I wanted to do was to have lunch with my niece Havah. (She is there as an exchange student.)I remember them wakeing me up and telling me I needed a transfusion, and having me sign something. All of these memories seem very haphazard though. I can't be sure what order they happened in, or even if they really happened at all. They all have a dream aura to them.

Then there are the things that I did, and I have no memory of at all. Deb told me that one time I stood up on my bed and took all my cloths off, and laid back down and fell back to sleep. When she asked me why, my responce was "They wanted a show, so I gave them a show". She also tells me that there was a period of a few days that I was saying everything three times and was completely out of touch with reality. She brought Brad in to the room to visit and asked me if I knew who was there. My reply was "Big day, big day, big day". Poor kid was telling everyone that I gave him a new nickname. She also tells me that there was a time that I spent most of my time sitting up on the bed, with my legs crossed in front of me, bouncung up and down.

All in all, it was a bumpy ride. Hopefully someday I'll be able to remember some more of what happened so I can make sence of it. It's maddening, not knowing.