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Saturday, March 2, 2013

A bit of post surgery drama.

I got my back operated on February 12th.  Everything went well and the only casualty has been my computer.

Here's the view from my hospital bed.  When they bought me here after my operation, the sun was setting and the valley was bathed in a golden light.  Very pretty.  The view from the window is of Spokane, Washington, looking east towards Idaho.
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Here's the other side of bed.  Notice the crucifix on the wall.  I think they had it handy on the wall so a priest could grab it and wave it at me if my head started spinning around while I had my traditional post operation vomit..(remember the movie 'The Exorcist' :)    
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When the nurses came in to my room and asked me how I was doing I wanted to say, pointing at the crucifix, "Better than him.....he looks cross".   I behaved myself though.

They took really good care of me.  I had some really kind and caring nurses.  I really enjoyed the company of the day shift nurse.  Out of curiosity I asked how many patients she had to care for and she told me three.  When her shift ended she came in to say goodbye and tell me she really enjoyed taking care of me.  I thought that was so nice.

I was kept in the hospital overnight and Brad and William come to get me late in the afternoon after the new tractor they just bought was being delivered.  I was very much looking forward to putting my feet up and enjoying a proper cup of tea....well that's not what happened.

Soon as we got to the house we noticed the porch lights were flickering and when Brad and William opened the door I heard the smoke alarms all going off!   I don't remember getting out of the car, but next thing I knew I was in the smokey house rushing around looking for the fire.  You have to be really careful how you move after you have a back surgery - no bending, lifting or twisting.  In my haste, I forgot all about my back and I hope I didn't do anything to damage it.  It didn't help that in the chaos Teddy was jumping all over me.

This is what happened; we were having continuous electrical surges and the higher voltage fried my computer, the surge protectors, the emergency power failure lights, some electric fence chargers, for some reason my new food processor and the smoke detectors.  When the smoke detectors were hit with the higher voltage they started smoking and set themselves off.  The acrid smoke was coming from all the electrical things that were getting destroyed by the high voltage.  Brad and William's computers were fine for some reason.

William went down to the basement and shut off the electric current coming into the house, Brad checked for fires upstairs and I checked the ground floor and discovered the office all smokey.  We called our power company and they were out in a jiffy.  We were the only ones affected and it was easy for the power company to find the problem because it was at one of our transformers.  While we were waiting to get back on line, Brad went to our little house, which is upstream from the electrical problem, with a kettle to boil water to make me a cup of tea and fill a hot water bottle so I could be comfortable.  What a dramatic home coming!

I bought a new computer and I have been getting familiar with it.  It comes with Windows 8 and I downloaded the lasted version of Microsoft Office, so it's something different for me.  I have my fingers crossed that we can retrieve all my files from my old computer.

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