Following the beaten path, or “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”

I have been posting on this site/blog since, I think, 2011. At first, I published mostly photographs, since that is my area of special expertise as an avocation. Once I had published most of my good photographs, I started writing general pieces covering everything that interested me.

To date, after posting 2,291 times, I have a list of 173 people who have requested email notifications of new posts but only two or three reads each for most of them. That, I would say, is an unmitigated failure if my criterion were the number of people I have reached. However, my actual criterion for success is whether I have enjoyed doing it, and there it has been resounding.

Notably, over the time I have been blogging, the number of people who do that (blog) has increased many-fold, with inevitable division of the audience for each individual site.

So, there is that.

Unfortunately for me, last year I came down with a fairly bad case of COVID (despite full vaccination with two Pfizers) and was admitted to the hospital on September 11 (or was it the 12th?) with a temp of 102 and an oxygen saturation of 88. Oddly, I had little or no cough. Subsequent evaluation revealed a right middle lobe pneumonia, which has gradually improved but not fully resolved on serial CT examination.

Pneumonia was not my only problem, however. For nine days, I was isolated and not allowed to even get out of bed (at all). After seven or eight days, when I threatened to sign out Against Medical Advice (cutely called “eloping”), I finally received a visit from my entire team of doctors… this turned out to include the “senior” doctor, whom I don’t recall seeing ever before or since.

None of them dared to come within ten feet of me, but they all insisted that I had to stay in the hospital for at least another week and get a colonoscopy (where they stick a tube up your rectum nine or ten feet to see why you’re bleeding.) Of course I refused that too and a couple of days later they had to let me go. The diarrhea stopped the day I left the hospital.

When I was finally released (after they finally allowed me to get out of bed and shuffle to the door and back one time) I was profoundly weakened and depressed. Did I mention the bloody/melanotic stool (black and smelly diarrhea) that was provoked by their treatment with anticoagulants?

Parenthetically, complete bed rest rapidly causes profound weakness in almost everyone, sick or well. Within three days a person’s strength and stamina is often decreased by half.

I have been getting, finally (since June), “home health care” (rehabilitation therapy) twice a week for the new few months. Otherwise, I was forced to recover on my own and developed a string of complications, none of them really serious (if you don’t count the episode of atrial flutter, commonly known as an “irregular heart beat.”) but several for which the doctors added additional medications (notice that I didn’t say “required”– I didn’t really need them.)

So I have a good excuse for not posting, at least since last May. I have improved, mostly on my own, which is in line with my behavior over the years of refusing medical care or even hospitalization after many serious illnesses and injuries.

Probably the most serious of these was a concussion after someone ran a stop sign and crashed into my pickup while I was innocently driving along a country road on December 27, 1999. I won’t bore you with the details of the others, particularly since I have kept a “stiff pecker” (a Britishism, meaning in American a stiff upper lip or attitude of reticence and denialism) about most of them.

If anyone should happen to read this, please do not comment merely to provide sympathy. I will not approve a comment unless it is at least two-three sentences and appears to express a unique non-automated opinion.

Otherwise, thank you for taking the time to read this.

sleeping fox by pexels via pixabay.com