My Health

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a fever and otherwise just felt ill. My doctor put me in the hospital for tests and quickly found that I had a bacterial infection in my blood. Treatment was I.V. antibiotics. We had to try a few, and  ultimately found that ampicillin was the cure. My infection cleared up quickly when we found the right drug.

However, tests revealed endocarditis, infection on at least one of my heart valves.

At this point, I was shipped off by ambulance to the cardiac care unit at UAB Hospital, among the best heart hospitals in the world, for a possible valve replacement or two.

UAB continued the I.V. antibiotics and ran additional tests on my heart. Today, they decided  to send me home with an I.V. pole, a PICC line, and instructions to take 6 more weeks of I.V. antibiotics at home. They’ll do follow up testing in a few weeks.

The hospital has kept me busy with constant testing, trips down the halls for procedures, and such. I’m very sleep deprived, and I’ve completely failed to catch up on my reading as I had planned. Too tired. I’m looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep at home — with no one waking me to take vitals and no I.V. alarm going off at deafening levels. (When you have two or three IVs going at once, there’s nearly always an alarm sounding.)

The quality of care has been excellent, but I miss my sleep … and DVR.

Denise (my wife) was able to sneak a 32″ hi-def TV into our room for the LSU – Alabama football game. I became the most popular patient on the hall! Lesson learned: don’t assume there’s no solution and so fail to find a solution. Assume that a solution exists and then find it. (In many mathematical puzzles, the key to solving the math is to assume that there is an answer.)

A  heart-valve replacement still remains a possibility, but if so, it’ll be a month or two down the road. Please be in prayer that I don’t need surgery. I’ve really had enough hospitalization for a while.

Of course, this has had an impact on the blog. I’ve had to stay away from the comments the last few days. Just haven’t been up to it. And I missed a day or two posting. And I think my typo rate has skyrocketed.

On the other hand, email subscriptions have passed 3,000, and I learned that one of my books is being studied in a Church of Christ Bible class in Southeast Asia — which is about as far from Tuscaloosa as you can get. It’s encouraging to know that my work is being studied by the church across the globe! So maybe I’ll keep at it for a while longer … Lord willing.