I would like to say Thank You to everyone who left well wishes and words of encouragement while I was gone.

It would be an understatement to say this has been an ordeal and it ain’t over yet by a longshot.

But I did well enough to get out of the hospital in 3 days like I told the doctor instead of the 3-5 which she kept insisting on.

The hospital staff was top notch, the food was awesome and I was treated very well.

Now I have this gnarly incision I have to heal up from.

The procedure didn’t go as planned which is no surprise.

The right side was simple and easy, the left side turned into a bit of a nightmare.

She did a “Poke” with a big syringe and threaded a wire through on the right side with a balloon and a stent on it. She inflated the balloon about half way up to clear some blockage, again at the top and then installed the stent on the right side. The left side, she made an incision, tried to poke through the blockage and it wouldn’t go.

She tried to go up and around back through the right side but no luck. The blockage on the left was solid calcium basically like concrete.

She wound up cutting it open more at the fold in my leg and digging out half of the blockage. She said that there was a normally small artery that had tripled in size that was trying to go around the blockage but that only a trickle of blood was getting through. She cleaned out to the point that the artery was dumping into the Femoral and bypassing the upper half of the blockage where she had wanted to put the other stent.

It was a 5 hour surgery and to try and dig out the upper half would have meant making the incision go clear up into my abdomen which was not good so she called it when she got it cleaned out as good as she could. She said it was as big around as a felt pen and about 3 1/2 inches long that she dug out.

It is what it is. There is definitely more blood flowing and she had a little machine with a small microphone and a speaker that she could stick the microphone right on some small arteries in both feet and hear the blood flowing through that she couldn’t hear before the procedure.

I won’t know how much my total condition will improve for some time until this big incision heals up and I can do some walking to judge distance and pain.

I did 2 laps around the floor of the hospital today about 2 hours apart and that was good enough to get me discharged. I still have several other arteries that are completely blocked but this was the only option for treatment at this time.

I’ll take what I can get and I am grateful for that.

So once again I would like to say thanks for the concern and well wishes. It’s going to be a couple of weeks for this to heal up but I have some decent pain medication and now the Wifely Unit can tell me to quit doing everything I try instead of the cute little Nurse Ratchet I had. She was awesome and had an attitude so we battled from the first meeting.

We parted happy to have met each other with mutual respect and I sang her praise to my doctor too.

I heard one nurse tell her that I was the best patient on the whole floor shortly after we met so it just goes to show I can be a nice guy when I want to be.

I just got home a few minutes ago so I am going to take some pain medication and kick back for a while.

I’ll spare ya the pictures, at one point I thought it looked like someone was practicing sex changes on me.

It’s pretty gnarly.

Y’all take care.

Oh, one more thing,

Thanks CederQ, for keeping the joint open while I was gone.