Back from the (almost) dead!

Oh. Hai thurr.

It has been a little over 2 months since my last post, and while I am not one for making excuses, I have been rather busy.

First of all, the night of my last post I got fired from Bullseye, Inc. It is not a particularly long story, but it is one that I am not particularly inclined to share with the world at large. At least not yet. But the end result of that caused me to not be in the mood to do a lot of blogging.

A week or so after that, I got sick with what we originally thought was a ear infection. It wasn't, but the antibiotics made the pain go away for a while. More on that in a bit.

Around this time my Aunt Mary Ellen passed away. She and my Uncle Jim were two of the first people in my family to tell me to go for it when I started getting serious as an actor/comedian.

Right after that I started feeling better (shows what *I* knew) just in time for my performance as Alfred Hitchcock at Westminster Hall (in downtown Baltimore where he is buried) as part of the year long Poe Bicentennial. Apparently I was on BBC World News. Who knew?

And then the fun started.

I started getting some swelling in my jaw. I went back to the doctor, who told me I probably had an abscess in my lower jaw. That was on a Friday. So on Monday I went to the dentist's office (specifically Kernan, since I don't have dental insurance and I get the "friends and family and former longtime co-worker discount"). They took one look at me (and one x-ray) and told me I had to go see a specialist, so one of the front desk people (Pat) called down to the UMMS Oral Surgery Department and pulled some strings (it seems she spent years working for the doctor who runs the department and called him directly and got me shoehorned into the schedule.

Wifey and I get there, and the first two doctors look at me and say that this is not that big of a deal and they can take care of it right there in the office. The aforementioned head of the department came in, took one look at the x-ray and at me and said that I needed to be admitted and this would be an overnight stay.

And that probably saved my life.

By this point pretty much everyone who reads this knows that I am diabetic. Well, it seems by blood sugars were not nearly as under control as they needed to be, and there were some serious complications during the surgery. Odds are if they had tried to do the procedure in the clinic they wouldn't have had the ability to handle when I crashed. But we weren't in the clinic, and they had the ability. They had to induce me into a coma that lasted for about 2 weeks, and for a while during that I was still pretty touch and go, however I never went anywhere, and after a long stay in the hospital I returned home, where I now am continuing my slow return to whatever passes for normal in regards to me.

It is funny what I remember (or more to the point DON'T remember) about the whole ordeal. I distinctly remember going to Kernan, and going to UMMS and being seen by the doctors. Then things start to get a little fuzzy. The next thing I could remember was being in a hospital room with Wifey and my parents and a couple of nurses while I got undressed and into one of those oh so flattering hospital gowns (later on after I woke up I asked Wifey how my parents got there since they had not been with us at all before that. She said that when we found out I was being admitted for an overnight stay that we had to call them. I do not remember that at all, but since they were there, it has to be true). The next thing I remember is waking up in a room and being convinced that Wifey and a friend were on the other side of my privacy curtain giggling and plotting something. At that point I had no idea that it was 2 weeks later and that there was a hole in the bottom of my jaw/top of my neck. A day or two after I woke up I met another doctor, who walked in with a bunch of younger doctors around him and started speaking to me (well, more about me to them, but at least he acknowledged my presence during his speechifying), saying things like "there he is, up and awake", or something like that (things are still kinda fuzzy about a lot of things) in a very pleasant baritone voice with an undertone of British formality. He spoke like we had spoken before, and apparently we did since he was the guy who actually performed the surgery. But I had no idea whatsoever who he was.

Also, as I mentioned previously, I had recently portrayed Alfred Hitchcock. Well it seems that I kept talking like him after I woke up. Specifically I repeatedly asked for "4 toast points with hot buttered marmalad" (the final "e" on marmalade was left off on purpose since I was saying it with a soft "a" sound on the end). To be perfectly honest I have no freaking idea what a "toast point" is, or why I wanted them. But I did. Apparently to the point of driving Wifey a bit crazy.

There are other stories, like how I eventually learned about the coma and the fact that I lost 2 weeks of my life (once all the dust is settled from dealing with all that happened the last couple of months I would love to go to a hypnotist and see if I can find out what I was thinking/dreaming about for those 2 weeks), and how the first day I was awake I was still on IV only, so that the next day when they actually brought me food (and specifically coffee) I teared up a little (and after I tried to eat those things that they called pancakes I teared up again, but this time for their destroying what had up to that point been a connection that only had positive connotations, that being "pancakes are yummy". They killed the shit out of that one). I learned that the name of the current President of the United States has a name that is a lot of fun to say when you are still a little loopy from all the drugs you have had injected into your body from little bags that are hanging from a pole next to your bed. And I learned that it is all but impossible to not flash people every time you move in a hospital bed when you have one of those gowns on.

I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to recognize and thank Wifey for being near me through it all. I have no firsthand knowledge of this, but apparently she stayed at the hospital for a few nights, and spent every moment possible there with me, and on more than one occasion making sure the nurses were on top of their game. I guess she and I are even now on the "catastrophic hospital stay/death scare" ledger.

While I am in the recognizing mood, I should also thank all of our family and friends who were there for Wifey while I was in drug induced dream land. I am sure some of these people have names that I have assigned them, but it has been so long since I have been here that I do not remember them and am just too dang lazy to go back into the archives to look them up. So, in no particular order...

• Pat
• Faith
• Dave
• Niji
• Mom
• Dad
• Carl
• Bill
• Shanelle
• Ronetta
• Shaye
• Morgan
• Christa
• Skye
• Fiona
• Keith
• Buttercup
• Tuxedo

...and I am sure that there are more who I was told about, but since I was still pretty slap happy from the whole ordeal (and am still randomly remembering stuff and asking Wifey for verification of my new found memories) I am unable to mention them here. Let me leave it with this: if you were there for her at all, no matter what it was that you did, then I thank you.

It is now almost 11 p.m., and I need to get myself into bed. Soon I will update again (I don't know how soon "soon" is, but rest assured the gap will be less than the 62 days separating this post from the one right before it).

And I will endeavor to make the next one less Hallmark Special Movie-of-the-Week and more of my usual trademark snark and sarcasm.

BSR