In my Share Your World post yesterday, I mentioned how grateful I am to finally be feeling good again. This post goes into a little more detail about what happened and how grateful I am to those who helped me out.

Almost six weeks ago I was transported by ambulance to the local emergency room. I really thought my number was up that day. I didn’t think I was going to live through the night and I was in such excruciating pain that I almost welcomed the notion of death as a way to escape the pain.

Nine days earlier I had back surgery to repair some fractures in my lower back that occurred in a fall in early November. Since that fall, I had been experiencing significant pain and was in great discomfort. Hence, I was eager for the surgery because I was looking forward to finally getting relief from my back injuries.

But that was not to be the case, and in the days following the surgery and my release from the hospital, my pain began to intensify to the point that I had to be transported to the ER. What I didn’t find out until the next day was that the surgeon who performed the operation to insert two screws into my sacrum had nicked an artery and in the nine days that elapsed between the surgery and my ER visit, I was bleeding internally and lost a lot of blood.

Another procedure was performed to stop the bleeding from the artery that had been nicked, and that procedure was successful and essentially saved my life.

And now, a little over three weeks since returning home after a few weeks in post-acute care rehabilitation and at-home physical therapy, I am feeling pretty damn good. I have gone from knocking at death’s door and wishing to die to feeling great about being alive.

I don’t have the words to adequately express the gratitude to the doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and others who brought me back from the brink and who have made it possible for me to feel relatively pain-free and optimistic for the first time in five months.

I do have some words I want to express to the surgeon who nicked my artery and almost killed me, but this is a PG-rated blog, so I think I’ll hold those for another time and just reiterate my gratitude to those who managed to identify what was killing me and were able to take steps to save my life.

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