What is this gumbo soup stuff you guys are always mentioning?

Maybe that heading made this food related.

I understand at least some of you noticed that I have been missing. I was a very sick puppy.

I have been in the hospital for 15 days, released a couple of days back. I take warfarin as a blood thinner for my carbon fiber, mitral heart valve - have done this for nine years now. For some reason, my blood suddenly got too thin and I developed a deep muscle bleed in my left thigh.

Started with pain, then a limp and then swelling, over a three day period. After three days, I suggested to the wife (MHNBPF) that we visit the ER, and they promptly stuck me in a room under the opinion that unless they did something quickly I might lose the leg. They gave me five units of plasma to thicken up my blood (drop the INR) and then the next day did emergency surgery to relieve the pressure and keep the bleeding from killing the muscles. All total, they did three surgeries on the leg over the next week, and gave me two units of blood.

The leg is lots better now and I am slowly hobbling around at home. I quickly graduated from a walker to a cane and am now in the process of walking without the cane. When all is better I will have a nice, loosely stitched, 12" Frankenstein scar on my thigh as a souvenir.

I am a guy who loves trouble, so toward the end of my ordeal (last Saturday night - 7 days back) I had what my Neurologist has diagnosed as "Transient Global Amnesia". I lost all memory of 13 hours of my life. Scared the hell out of the wife because I looped through the same small series of questions over and over for about 8 hours. The moment she would reach the end of her answers, I would apologize and start over with the exact same series of questions.

We have a very good, large set of friends - One couple - the husband is a physician - an internist not on my medical team and his wife is a long time friend of my wife. They got dressed and came to my wife's rescue late/late Saturday night and stayed with my wife and me for about three hours that night, into Sunday morning. I have absolutely no (Zip - Nada) memory of their visit, or anything else for the entire 13 hours. Apparently, I forgot my Father had died two years back and got very emotional, unable to understand why I couldn't remember that. The wife finally coaxed me to sleep (she didn't sing "Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty" but close to that) and I woke up later, 100% fine. They tell me it is unlikely to ever happen again. My memory is fine, other than the 13 hours of my event, which apparently are gone forever - the brain is a mysterious thing - I am certain those occurrences are somewhere inside of my head, just securely locked away. Obviously I scared the blazes out of my wife, who wondered for 13 hours if she was going to have a husband who would ever remember anything again.

Oh well, thanks for your concern. I am here and will begin posting again sometime.

God loves me and I am a blessed man.

MD