I am back-dating this post to the end of 2016 to explain why the number of blog posts for 2017 dropped so dramatically.
On March 22, 2017 I went in to emergency at the local hospital with what I thought and the doctors first thought was appendicitis. An abdominal drain was put in to drain off the expected infection with an appendectomy scheduled several weeks later. The abdominal drain, however, produced no signs of infection but rather a kind of mucous and I was sent on to a specialist in Seattle who diagnosed the problem as mucinous neoplasms of the appendix, basically a tumor of the appendix that was producing a mucous-like substance that would in time strangle my organs and that could also have been cancerous. I had surgery on May 9 and had my appendix, part of my colon, gall bladder, omentum and peritoneum removed and was in the hospital recovering until May 24th (15 days). Thankfully, there were no signs of cancer and after May 24th I spent several weeks recovering at home. The doctor said it would take two to three months to get my strength back. In June we met family members in the Black Hills and camped with them for a week, but after returning home with two of the grandchildren at the end of June I was back in hospital with blood clots in leg and both lungs. And at the beginning of August had my fourth hospital stay since the end of March, that time for an obstructed bowel, the result of scar tissue.
