A Msg from TruthIsAll on his health. Good news.

autorank

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Fri Oct-27-06 11:21 AM
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A Msg from TruthIsAll on his health. Good news.

After completing this article with TruthIsAll Protecting the Democratic Vote I checked in with him on his health. He sent me the following and asked that I share it with you. Great way to start the weekend. Note the last paragraph where, like all of us in the voting rights movement, he calls for massive turnout and an assertion of our undeniable right to vote and have that vote counted. autorank

I'm doing fine. I go for cardiac therapy three times a week for one hour per session. I use the Treadmill (20min), NuStep (20m) and weights to build up my legs and upper body. Today I walked 2 miles in less than an hour outside my home. Pretty good progress for someone who was written off as a dead man in April.

I had a major heart attack on Feb 18. They call it the "widow maker" since most people die from it. I required a triple bypass; that was the easy part. I was doing fine after one week, but went downhill from there. My wife went to a cemetery in early March and put a down payment on a burial plot, expecting that I would soon die.

I couldn't talk or breathe for six weeks without a ventilator and couldn't even get out of bed and stand up, much less walk, until the middle of May. I was fed through tubes for two months and lost over thirty pounds. I was sedated in the first hospital and hallucinating that the doctors were trying to kill me. They never encouraged me, unlike the doctors in the second hospital who were always positive. I had a fibrillator installed in May and began three weeks of physical therapy on June 1 and came home on June 23, where I continued three weeks of therapy at home and needed a walker to get around.

I fooled all those "doctors" in the first hospital who told my wife I was a goner and have literally returned from the dead. No one - friends, family, doctors - thought I would live. But I never even considered the possibility that I was going to die. My cardiologist in the second hospital (the good one) once asked me if I ever considered suicide. I asked him if he was serious.

Let me tell you about the only "good" hallucination I experienced. When they transferred me to the second hospital 200 miles away, I thought I was being flown in a small aircraft. I remember there were two pilots and I was seated in the front next to the pilot, while the other guy was in the back seat. They told me to lay on my stomach for the duration of the trip so I wouldn't experience nausea. I remember reading the controls (speed, altitude, etc.) and the pilot giving me hand signals to indicate he was going to adjust speed and/or altitude to avoid turbulence.

It wasn't until a month later that my wife told me that I was actually transported in a helicopter in a stretcher. Then it made suddenly made sense to me. I had tubes all over my body and in my mouth, so how the hell would I be expected to lay on my belly? It was all an hallucination - a mix of reality of the actual flight and the unreality of my position in the aircraft. And that was the GOOD hallucination. I won't even talk about the 10-20 horrible ones, such as being buried alive.

Let's put one current myth to rest. It's amazing that there are quite a few on DU who claim we are defeatist by writing about the potential for election fraud. They infer that we are demoralizing people who will not vote. THAT IS A CANARD. As far as I know, NO ONE ON DU HAS EVER suggested anything of a sort. In fact, we are encouraging everyone to vote to bring about a massive turnout so as to make it more difficult for BushCo to steal it.

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED.

Cheers

TIA