New Years Eve 2018

Going through my Facebook memories the other day, there was a picture of my foot from last year. The nurse had just left from putting on the wound vac dressing for the first time. The foot was red and swollen and I remember it hurting like the dickens anytime the dressing was changed. I thought about how much I had come through in the last 12 months to a point now where the wounds are mostly healed up save for some scabbing. There is just a little redness and almost no swelling that I can tell. It's a huge difference in just one year time.

Then I scrolled back in my Memories some more and it turns out that it was three years ago that day that I walked for the first time with my new prosthetic. It was the first time I had had two feet on the floor since my surgery on November 1st that year. I was using a walker and I barely made it fifty feet down the hall at the hospital and back. But it was progress! It was a lot of progress. Tonight I reshared a status update I made back then of the little girl who saw me walking with my prosthetic using my walker and said to her father, “Look, daddy, he's walking!” In that brief moment, she may have given me more hope than anyone else during that time.

It feels like time has moved so slowly since my medical problems started in March or April of 2015. I talk about the hope I felt back then when I was in the middle (or 1/3rd of the way through) a six month stay in the hospital. I really thought things were going to turn around on my release. And I guess they did. They just went the opposite way I thought they'd go. I have a file on my hard drive where I list all of my hospital stays. It started in late 2014 when my appendix burst and they had to go in for some reason to get it all. Including that time, I have been in hospitals for 340+ days and had thirteen different operations. Five of them were amputations. Most of them were revision surgeries or debridements of the wounds, mostly the foot.

But as I have mentioned, I am doing much better medically lately. There is still a small wound on the foot that my home health nurse is looking after. You have to understand that every time I went into the hospital for another debridement, I just knew they were going to tell me they needed to take the rest of the foot. Other times when another infection had, well, infected me, I thought that would kill me. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

So now on the dawn of a new year, I find myself thinking about the future more than I have in recent years. Evidently I am going to be around for a while longer which presents itself as a foreign thought. What is my life going to be like? One thing has been clear for a while. I can't stay in the boonies and expect things to change. I have known that since I moved here and my truck broke down. Friends have told me the same thing. And I believed them even if I wasn't ready to act on that impulse yet.

I remember New Year's Eve 1998. After a few rough years, I felt optimism in spite of recent events. I went into the field near where I lived at the time with a Corona or two and looked up at an awesome clear, black sky dotted with countless stars. I asked God or Fate or Chance to help me change things in my life. And my life changed greatly in 1999 for the better. Twenty years later, I'm hoping things will change even more in 2019.

I hope you all have a great New Year!