I hope every one had a good Christmas and New Years.

I wasn't around much last month. At the beginning of December my father almost died. He's doing fine now, but he's still recovering.

He had a temperature of a 103 when we got him to the emergency room. He had to have his gallbladder taken out. Turns out he had about a half dozen gall stones and one of them had passed through his pancreas, which is where the fever came from. Coupled with his age and diabetes it did complicate things and delayed the surgery a few days until the pancreas was strong enough. It got really scary.

The doctor suspected he had the gall stones for years, one of them was the size of a grape. About ten years ago my father hurt his spine which forced him to retire and go on disability, leaving him with cronic back pain and it was explained that pain in the gall bladder could be mistaken for back pain. Add to that my father's fear of hospitals...

Okay, the reason why dumb asses who are afraid of dying in hospitals end up dying in hospitals is because by the time they finally go to a hospital it's already too late.

Sorry. I've been holding on to that for awhile.

Fortunately, it wasn't too late for my father and he did get through the surgery (not without acouple of complications) all right in the end. He's now on a very strict diet and needs to have insulin injections (which he didn't need before this).

So he spent most of December in the hospital. He did come home in time for Christmas and New Years so I'm nothing but thankful for that.

I hope no one else had this much excitement for their holidays, but it did end very happily for my family


Joseph B