I returned home Saturday from a three-day ordeal at a Houston hospital.
I’m fine – an endoscopy found an ulcer and cauterized it, ending a bewildering array of conditions that beset me.
The ulcer bled me to the point it dropped my hemoglobin.
It’s kind of important for your blood to be fed with oxygen as a walk across a room ended in exhaustion. Seriously.
I suppose most people know that, but I’m usually late to find out important things.
Anyway, once the procedure was over I was ready to get out of Dodge.
That wasn’t to be.
The procedure was Thursday and I got to leave late Saturday afternoon.
Like a lot of kids, I hated the sight of a syringe. Still do.
I knocked a syringe out of our doctor’s hands when I was five and high-tailed it out the door and down the sidewalk.
My RN mother caught me – she rarely took a bemused viewpoint on acts of rebellion – it was the mid-1950s after all.
So, the three days I was there
I became a human pin cushion.
Little hard to escape wrapped in different tubes.
My deafness is legend here, and the blood-deprived hearing system dropped me into a world of mumbles.
If MaLinda wasn’t present to explain that I was really deaf as a post, I might as well have been that five-year-old again.
Of course getting that ulcer dealt with was a big plus, the hospital’s cable stations carried March Madness and I got to watch the Aggies work their way through the SEC tournament.
As an Aggie you learn early your team will put you through a grinder.
The Aggies lost an entire month (eight games) of SEC basketball games after starting out 4-0 in conference and ended with winning seven of its last eight games.
We lost the SEC championship to Tennessee Sunday.
We should have been included the NCAA championship playoff but we weren’t – the snub Sunday evening was rightfully met with outrage from the Aggie Nation.
Interestingly enough, fans of other schools – notably Tennessee and even Longhorns – shared our anger.
I was so upset the team had come back after that eight-game horror to fight for a chance for the show.
I might point out, for what it’s worth, most of the losses during that tortuous eight-game slide were close games.
Anyway, I was disappointed, but proud of the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Spirit.
