Catching up after recovering from food poisoning

Hello readers,

It has been a very long time since I have posted to my blog.  I am sorry about that, some unavoidable events have become paramount and it has taken me months to recover from it.

First, I had to abandon my trip to Alaska.  :-(
It's not that I wanted to, but 3 weeks before the Orange County Marathon (May 06, 2012) I contracted a bad case of food poisoning.  I was thinking it had to be from some iffy chicken I cooked.  It should have been fine but it was iffy.  That evening I had the most uncomfortable gastric distress (ewww), and it continued for 2 days, 4 days, a week, 3 weeks!!! and it didn't go away.  I did the Orange County Half Marathon (13.1 miles) but I did not finish pretty.  I had diarrhea 4 times during the run (yes, there were porta-potties) and I had to learn from a stranger that toilet seat covers work for emergency tissue paper.  OK folks, too much?  Nah, facts of life. Anyway, it took me more than 4 hours to finish, but I finished. 

4 days later I started passing out and took myself to the emergency room, had to hang out there for a few hours to find I had a 'mass' in my stomach.  Not really the food poisoning I thought it was but it was something.  I was hospitalized because the mass was what is called a 'phlegmon'... a pocket of infection protecting something.  After a week in the hospital on IV antibiotics I was going to be sent home for home IV treatments but I had a tachycardial event raising my BP above 220 so they put me in telemetry to check my heart and learned whatever it was in my stomach needed to be repaired.  So into an exploratory surgery I went. 

The surgeon found a ruptured diverticulitis and the phlegmon was protecting my appendix.  The surgeon had to resection out some large intestine and small intestine, but leaving my appendix.  (Why?  why not remove that unneeded unnecessary organ while in there!).  Anyway, I had another week in the hospital for the recovery of that one... 2 weeks with nothing by mouth, no water, no food, no IV food, nothing to go thru my intestines.  I did lose weight.  :-)  I wondered what would get me to do that.  hehehe.

Recovery was boring, but it happens of course.  I was out of work until the end of June.  Needless to say, but I will anyway, my birthday trip to hike Denali and do the Anchorage Mayor's Half Marathon had to be cancelled.  Can't really hike in the wilderness with an open abdominal wound, not with the wild animals up there.  And the marathon would probably have been uncomfortable also.

Oh well, maybe next year.  The Denali hike and the Anchorage Mayor's Half Marathon are still on my bucket list.  Maybe for birthday #52.  (I'm not making it a goal for #51, if you continue reading you will read why).