The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated! (Just Harlan checking in)

[Harlan (Deceased)]

Hi guys!

Sorry I’ve been mostly out of contact for the past couple of weeks.

I’ve been fighting a long battle with a problem I’ve had with my pancreas for the past four months. I’ve been in and out of the local ‘Mega’ hospital near my home three times for extended periods each over the past three months and each time they put me on a program where I couldn’t eat or drink anything at all. They’d think I was better after a few weeks of having no food and the readings from my pancreas would go to normal and then they’d send me home. I’d eat a liquid diet for a few days at home and then come down with pancreatitis again and end up back in the ER in terrible pain.

The second time I went in, they removed my gallbladder when I went in and it didn’t help anything at all.
(Who needs a gallbladder anyway?)

I had been taking my laptop with me and kept up with threads while sitting on my rear end doing nothing other than losing lots of weight that I could ill afford to lose, and taking lots of morphine for the pain.
Morphine is pretty good stuff, but it isn’t available by six packs at the corner store and I was pretty miserable each time I was sent home after they ‘cured’ me for a week or so.

After I went back in the third time with a new case of pancreatitis, and they said they were putting me on an ‘extended period’ of my only nourishment being fed through a tube in my arm, I began to get an attitude and wondered if they had the best solution.
I was down to 100 pounds by that time, and they wanted me to go for as long as three months with no real food, so I checked myself out and went to a different hospital to get a second opinion from a specialist who had a good reputation.

The new specialist found that I had a duct inside my pancreas that was broken in two that was causing the whole problem all the time. I could have gone without food until I was a bleached skeleton and it wouldn’t have helped anything!
It took the new specialist about an hour to locate the problem on a Saturday afternoon. He showed me the CT scan he took of the broken duct and he said it needed to be ‘repaired’ as soon as possible and he worked on me that Saturday evening.

He was able to go in with a probe with a camera attached and he repaired it without any surgery at all. I was able to start eating real food again the next day. He released me a couple of days later. That was a few weeks ago, and my pancreas is working fine now, but I was so down from having no food for so long from the ‘Exemplary Job’ they did at the first hospital that I could hardly walk on my own with my now bony legs.

I’m recovering now, but it’s been very difficult to put on any weight. It’s been very slow because my stomach was shrunk down so much I could only eat a few bites of food at a time, and didn’t have much of an appetite anyway. I think I had been working from ‘nervous energy’ for a long time, but a couple of weeks ago I started feeling very, very weak and I had to take a break from everything and just try to eat, drink lots of ‘Ensure’ drinks and start trying to put on some weight and rest.

Doug (Badger) gave me medical leave from my web site duties with full pay and benefits!
(Nice guy!)

I’ve not been doing much of anything for the past two weeks but eating, watching TV, reading while sitting on my rear end in my easy chair, and sleeping a LOT. I think everything finally caught up with me, but there were times a week or so back where I felt like I couldn’t wake up even after sleeping twelve hours!

I didn’t think I’d be missed for a week or so, and I didn’t tell most people about all my woes, and hardly even opened my email last week. I just took a break from the world and got lazy I guess. I started logging on again a couple of days ago and found there were several people looking for me -
No Bill, NOT the police! (This time)

I’m really sincerely touched there were people concerned about my well being and I’m sorry I didn’t tell everyone about the problems I’ve been having. The medical stuff was frustrating to me and became a mess, and I didn’t know myself what was going on half of the time. I just wanted to get well and keep going on. Bill Hollinger called me last night and suggested that I leave a note to let everyone know I’m doing OK because a few people were asking in some of the threads, etc.

Again, I apologize that I’ve been out of contact. I’m up to 120 pounds now and starting to feel better over the past couple of days. I’ll probably be back full time in a week or so if I keep feeling better.

Take care guys, and always remember to never be shy about asking for a SECOND OPINION!

~ Harlan (AKA) CAFDFW

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