So, it went like this. Joan and i were out shooting with Dusty. A bear came down from the close-by mountain and charged after me. You see, bears only really go after the alpha male in a group of mammals. Naturally, the bear gravitated towards me....Anyway, i secure Joan behind me and wait to see what the bear's next move is going to be. As it bounds toward me, i dig my feet in and prepare for the impact (Alpha males don't run, they challenge!). The bear is bounding closer and closer and just when it is about 5 feet away, i hear a loud BANG!!! I look up just as the bear goes lifeless in mid-air due to the impact of the shotgun Joan just shot the bear with. The bear falls onto me and his lifeless claw splits open my stomach as we collapse to the ground. The adrenaline is pumping through my veins, my stomach feels warm as my shirt sticks to my torn flesh. I'm being crushed by the massive weight of this Grizzly Bear. Dusty picks up the bear (literally, he picked it up) and throws it in the back of the 4runner. (Naturally, we're going to want to show the bear off later. If anything, Joan and i could cut it up and live off the meat for a year and donate the brain to the BYU anatomy lab...) He then picks me up, puts me in the 4runner. Joan speeds across the countryside to the nearest hospital as i slip into an unconscious state. Finally, just before my body begins to shut down, the surgeons contain the bleeding. I stabilize.
Yeah......so, maybe it didn't quite go like that. Here's the story in a nutshell. End of January i had started feeling sick in the stomach. I thought it was the usual stomach flu. This goes on for the weekend. Finally, Sunday night rolls around and i am having bring-you-to-your-knees pain in my stomach, specifically in my right side. Naturally, we thought it was appendicitis. ER admits me. An intravenous ct scan, rectal contrast ct scan, 6 vials of blood, and a few pushes of morphine and i'm sitting on the 6th floor at 4am. It wasn't appendicitis, but they could see air trapped in the wall of my colon. Something called pneumatosis intestinalis.Okay, we're going to pause here for a second and clear some things up. For some odd reason, people think that your colon somehow means your anus or your butt or some other inappropriate body part. For the record, the colon= large intestine. I told someone at school the other day that i had a third of my colon taken out and he was like,"Dude! That sucks! Can you even go to the bathroom anymore?!!?! That must suck to sit down!" No, actually, when they took out my colon they took out my digestive system. I don't eat anymore, so i don't have to go to the bathroom....Of course i can still go to the... You know what, nevermind. Moving on.
Anyway, they take me off food altogether in the hospital. They gave me a "pick line". Which is like an IV but its a catheter that goes in through a vein in your inner bicep and they feed the catheter through the vein all the way to the heart. I could feel them pushing it through....and a good portion of the way to my heart. It was trippy. Actually, i enjoyed seeing them do all the different tests and stuff. It was fascinating! So, this catheter is what pumps my food straight to my heart. I was on this for about a week. To the right here, you can see three of the usual four bags of liquid going into my heart. The yellow stuff is the food. The small one is my antibiotic. The back one is just your usual saline solution. I usually had a white bag which was giving me my lipids and fats. Anyway, i could go off about all the cool things i liked...but i'll spare you the time.
So, they did 3 X-rays, 3 ct scans, 2 EKGs, an echocardiogram, and i was usually wearing a heart monitor stuck to my chest. It was fantastic. In this picture you can see the falls risk sign on my door. Yeah, so the first night i was there, they had taken all this blood and i was on morphine, and they weren't letting me eat anything (i'm hypoglycemic...bad idea) so i get up to go to the john at like 3 am. As i head back to bed i just plain passed out. I was out before i hit my head on the door frame and then collapsed to the ground. Joan freaked and ran out to get the nurses. Anyway, about 20 seconds later i wake up to the nurses and Joan pulling me up off the ground. So, for the next two weeks i got to deal with nurses thinking i was an eighty-year -old "Falls Risk".
After a week of not knowing exactly what was causing so much pain, the doctor decided to just take out the inflamed portion of my colon. Its the ascending colon. So, they gave me an epidural (not too comfy...) to paralyze me. Next thing i knew, i was being wheeled back up to my floor. The next day i tried to sit up and instantly a massive headache hit me. Turns out, the epidural punctured my spinal column and i was leaking cerebral spinal fluid. They thought it would go away with a day or so. It didn't. So they did a blood patch to fix it. That was equally comfortable to the epidural. Within 30 minutes i was feeling good! Basically what they did was cut down around my belly button. The doctor reached in, cut off my ascending colon and took it out. He then reattached the rest of my large intestine to my small intestine. As they were putting the cut-out portion of my large intestine in the biohazard bin a large parasite crawled out of it. The doctor tried to grab it, but then it knocked him over. The nurses had to pile on to the parasite. Unfortunately the doctor got bit by it and lost a finger......
Turns out, when they finally pulled out the bad part of my intestine they were really glad they took it out. The intestinal wall was inflamed and weakened. The doctor said my intestine had flipped and was cutting off its own circulation. If they hadn't have taken it out, the intestine most likely would have burst....which would have been horrible. Overall, it was 13 days in the hospital. Joan slept the night in that wretched chair almost every night. I have to give her credit for always being there for me. She's such a sweetheart. I appreciate every one who came to visit, called, sent messages, and helped out with meals. It really meant so much! A special shout-out goes to my family for making the effort to come down (especially my brothers and Dusty for the blessing), for Devin in supplying me with endless movies, and for Dusty in making me smell his amazing burger as he ate it right next to me as i soaked in my IV.... (just kidding, Dusty was there every single day, thanks Dusty)
They stapled my stomach shut. It looked like a caterpillar!
This was the day they took the staples out. Awesome!
And the final product. They kept my mole intact. For this, i am grateful.
Alright peeps, thats it for now. Have a good night!
