Greetings Happy Campers,

Here we are on the precipice of summer! The other day Suzie, Clara and I sat in the backyard for a few hours and got some sun. The Mrs. kept telling me my skin was too soft and delicate so I spent most of the time in the shade. It was nice to sit outside and not need a blanket.

On the medical front things are going pretty well. I hate to jinx it but we have had slow, yet consistent, improvement since we removed the trach at the end of February. My lungs have been pretty clear for the last two or three weeks. We have a nebulizer and have gone from doing breathing treatments twice a day to only once or twice a week. If the weather stays warm (if we don’t need to run the heat) and the humidity stays up, I’ll probably just stop them altogether.

It’s a funny thing being able to breathe without worry. I started coughing in November; didn’t really stop until early May. When you’ve spent six months doing something it’s really weird to not do it anymore. Whenever I used to move (or be moved) stuff would always be shifting in my lungs. We would play the game of sit up, lay flat, cough, sit up, breathing treatment, lay flat, cough, sit up, lay flat, repeat. I still have the anticipation of having to go through the routine. Waking up and being able to breathe is actually kind of stressful.

Sometimes you don’t realize how crappy you were feeling until you feel better. Hindsight being 20/20, I can now tell you that I was really sick – like really really sick – in December, January and into February. So the good news is I feel much better. The bad news is I have so much energy I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I do have a list of things, little projects I have been meaning to get started on, that I hope will keep me busy. Feeling better going into summer is a good problem to have.

On the physical therapy front, I have been doing occupational therapy at Advocate (Lutheran General) for the last several weeks. It’s going pretty well… if I would do my homework. I got a whole bunch of exercises that I’m supposed to do a couple of times each day. Some days we reach that goal; some days we don’t. But I do think some progress is being made. We’ve also come up with a lot of ideas for making things a little easier, like eating and maybe using the computer. I can’t use a mouse, but we’re getting to the point where I can almost use a trackball. That would be much better. So there is improvement albeit very slowly.

I would be remiss if I didn’t include a few words about wounds. Now let me give you a Pro Tip: do NOT, under any circumstances, perform a Google search for “wounds bedsores” and then click on Images. DO NOT DO THAT! Should you perform those steps, the consequences are severe. You’ll have to smash your computer monitor or your phone until it is in tiny pieces. The pieces will have to be put in a blender so that they can be turned into dust. That dust and the blender will have to be burned and the ashes will have to be buried someplace that you will never visit again. Once buried, the earth will have to be salted to be sure that nothing ever grows there. As I say, consequences.

As for my wounds, they are healing. Back in December I must’ve been sleeping funny one night in the hospital. Ended–up with bedsores on both legs where your leg meets your butt. Now I’m no doctor, but from what I can tell there are three stages to the wound healing process. The first stage is known as “the profanity stage”. At this point the wound is fairly new and no one really knows what to do. It appears to me, the medically approved treatment method at this stage is a combination of repeated swearing coupled with copious navel gazing, and the use of a scalpel. At this point the wounds actually have to be made bigger to remove any dead skin and expose fresh skin underneath. A doctor does this manually with a scalpel trying to avoid anything important like tendons or ligaments.

Next comes what I call “the maggot stage”. At this point you are waging a war against dead tissue. I guess new stuff will not grow with dead stuff on top of it. And I guess some tissue is always dying and so it’s kind of like trying to fill a bucket with a hole. I should mention that I have been going to the same wound care clinic for over a year. So we kinda know everybody there; and the staff there has gotten pretty comfortable with us. A few weeks ago we were talking with the nurses there about how disgusting these wounds can be and one volunteers, “Oh we’ve seen people come in with maggots.”

For the record, modern medicine has its own solution to the dead skin problem that does not involve fly larva. There is some special sauce that costs $1000 per tube that you put inside the wound and will dissolve the dead tissue. But if you want to do it the old-fashioned way I’m told it works and that nature does a pretty good job of cleaning–up. So there are options.

Once you win the war against the dead tissue, the wounds enter the third and final phase (which is not yet cleverly named.) Now the wounds should expose healthy tissue and we really only need to help it along and keep it clean. Because we, as Americans, generally have a crappy diet and don’t eat enough muscle and connective tissue (a topic for a different post) modern medicine has created a collagen wafer which can be broken up and put in the wound. The wafer dissolves over two or three days and helps new fat and skin grow. Keep everything clean, change the dressing as needed, and you have accelerated wound healing.

Thankfully both of my wounds are now in the final stage. If everything goes well they should be healed in a matter of weeks. A person in my condition will always have to be vigilant, but getting these wounds healed would be a major milestone. I have been contending with a wound in some form or another since the accident.

Friendly reminder that if anyone ever wants to chat I do have a standing zoom call every Sunday at 3:30 Chicago time.

Here’s the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86244670091?pwd=YTQvYytVd2k0czJRTVdpd0l2UjJrZz09

As always, thank you for all the kind thoughts and prayers.

Jim