Hey there fellow campers! Things have been quiet of late for a number of reasons, most of which I will try and go over in today’s diatribe. But in the meantime I would like to give a big shout out to some of my friends south of the border, who I finally managed to visit. One of them even had a shiny new toy to show me, and should now be showing up ’round these parts from time to time.

So, here’s the deal: I’ve been having some SiCKO adventures of my own. Towards the end of June, I finally went back to a doctor after a considerable period of time without having done so. They did the whole physical thing, and after informing me that it feels (cough) like I don’t have colon cancer (news: Yay! procedure: Not so much*), they did an EKG - all standard procedure for physicals these days. The GP then came into the examination room, and told me (I’m paraphrasing here) that “when the EKG looks like this, it usually means that the person attached to the machine has had a heart attack.”

Which kind of set me back a bit. I always thought that a heart attack was not something you went through without noticing, and I didn’t recall any sort of episode, nor did anyone in my personal circle. Then again, I am one of the few people that anyone knows who has slept through an earthquake - so I might have slept through that event as well. Then I read about silent heart attacks, and being a very good example of a very stubborn Belgian, I might have thought to tough out this type of event. Yet I still do not have any sort of recollection of that sort of thing happening to me. I did mention one piece of medical news that I thought was a good thing - I used to have plantar warts, but they went away over the last several months - and was surprised to hear the doc tell me that this lended even more credence to her theory.

Well, this led to a whole series of subsequent medical consultations, which led me to be admitted into a hospital on Tuesday for a cardiac catheterization. Basically they poke a hole in your femoral artery, stick a tube with a camera in it, inject some dye to make the pictures easier to see, and take close up and personal snaps of your circulatory system. Then, depending on what they see, some tuneup procedures may be done to make sure everything is working good enough to ensure survival. In this case, that involved inserting a stent into one of my arteries.

And, the best part: after all of this, the experts got to take a good look at the ticker, and they let me know that I didn’t have a heart attack after all!

For now, I’m on a number of additional medications, I’m not allowed to drive until Friday at the earliest, I can’t go up stairs, lift much of anything, stay in the sun, or have sex until the weekend either, and I think it’s time to re-quit smoking once again**. The initial scare from the end of June caused me to make significant changes in my diet and exercise regimes as well, resulting in some much needed weight loss (now I’m just under being obese enough for stomach stapling to be medically recommended, although this doctor said she would still give me all the necessary doctor’s notes if I chose to get this done) and positive reinforcement that it is possible for me to get in shape on my own. I’m down to two strong cups of coffee a day (let’s not even get into the caffeine headache I got last night, until I could convince a nurse to give me a cup of coffee at 11PM). It looks like I have a handle on the current situation (at the very least I have something to do that may be able to positively affect it). And, as long as I can stick to the general rule of nothing in excess, most anything in moderation, I should be able to engage in most of the activities I used to enjoy - although I’m not entirely sure when I will be back on the ice between the pipes again. Maybe I can get down to playing bogey golf in the next few years…

* - I know some people get a lot of enjoyment in having two other attractive people in the room, and having one of those people insert things into your rectal cavity. I hear some even get paid a lot to do that sort of thing in a non-medical capacity. Let me go on the record here and inform the studio audience that it is most definitely not among the more kinky things that Your Humble Narrator would desire in the way of inter-personal interactions…

** - I have managed to get down to about five cigs a week, so, yes, I am somewhat close to my goal already. And relatively proud and happy to make it down to that level.

Editors’ Note: this entry has been cross-posted at the Funny Farm]