Returning to the Land of the Living - Part Two of Two

Things are slowly getting a bit healthier on this end.  When I think back to how bad it got, I just want to block it all out of my memory.

Writing about what I went through health-wise over the last year and a half is hard as I was in enough pain and doped up enough that the details are blurred.

Generally speaking though, it was the summer of 2009 that my body really started to rebel.  The emotional climate had been somewhat stressful leading up to that summer though.  The first shot across the bow happened when I was driving down Interstate 94, from Port Huron to Detroit, delivering some autoparts.  I heard on the radio news that Countrywide Financial could not rollover its commercial paper.  Although I'm no one's whizkid on money matters, I recognised that not being able to roll over its commercial paper was a bad thing for Countrywide. In essence, imagine making mortgage payments on your house or car payments and your lender says, "Sorry, we want our money back."  You won't be having a good day when that happens.

Sure enough, for me anyway, this was my beginning of the credit crisis.  Slowly but surely, auto parts deliveries slowed, meaning my income went down.  Cashflow or the lack of it, stresses me out.  Like the rest of us, I reckon.  By the summer of 2008, was sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.  I don't wait well.  The placement agency I was with was able to get me another placement starting October 1st, 2008.  At least my cashflow stabilised but the bad news from the financial industry kept coming and the automotive sector kept getting slower.  All this bad news kept eating away at my insides.  Add to that some hardened C.A.W. types at the employers facility and I felt as if I was sizzling in a frying pan.  For me, I was quite frightened by watching the parts warehouse where I was shunting go through rounds of overtime and then voluntary and involuntary layoffs.  Always in the back of my mind, am I next? And the layoffs continued.  In June of 2009, My employer was feeling the pinch as well and had to reduce driver benefit package.

I got through the winter of 2008 and 2009 and the traffic at the parts warehouse was slowing down.  It don't sit well.  Sitting and waiting for something to happen worries me, even if I'm getting paid.  By August 2009 anything I ate just zoomed through me.  By September 2009, I was experiencing nausea.  Even if I only drank water, I would vomit, usually needing to stop the shunt truck to do so.

Several of my coworkers told me to go see a doctor.  (But all I heard rattling around in my little head was "Suck it up, don't be a weenie like those who run to the emergency department for a runny nose or an ear ache.  Suck it up!")  So I sucked it up.  Things continued to get worse.  Still, I was hoping that what was ailing me was a self-limiting pathogenic issue.  By late August 2009, blood started showing up in my stool.  Finally, in early September I saw my General Practitioner and he sent me off to the medical lab for a stool sample to be submitted.  The abdominal pain was enough that I was popping Tylenol 3's to deal with the pain.  Imagine rusty knives trying to get out of your bowels.

September 22nd, 2009 was the watershed night.  The abdominal pain was intense, the nausea relentless.  Then, as the gastric convulsions continued, I started vomiting blood.  At this point I'm bleeding out of both ends.  I finally called my mother to take me to the hospital.  I sucked it up as long as I could.  Now whatever had a grip on me was bigger than I was.  My dad died of colon cancer.  He bled out his backside before he was diagnosed with what would become terminal colon cancer.  He died September 2000.  Needless to say, my mother was a basketcase driving me to the hospital.  I navigated, she steered the car.  It was around 11:00 p.m., on September 22nd, 2009 that I was admitted to Guelph General Hospital.  Within minutes I was quarrantined and hooked up to a one litre bag of saline I.V.  Then the fun started.