Greetings!! I've finally been able to get back on line after a miserable month recovering after surgery over the holidays...

To make a long and boring story shorter, I had a colonoscopy about a week before Christmas. I've had probably 15 of those scans over the years since I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis around 1992... Anyways had the procedure on a Monday and went home like I always do to sleep off the anesthesia. I woke up with just terrible indigestion and abdominal pain, which is semi-normal post-op symptoms. Then it does not get any better for the next 3 days, although I was feeling recovered enough to go to work on Thursday. This "indigestion" was still very prevalent, but I was NOT normally prone to having it at all, even after a huge spicy Mexican dinner!

I figure something must be going on, so I call the doc and he sends me for x-rays to just to be safe. Then I get the call at 11pm at night that there seems to be a tear or perforation in my colon somewhere. Go directly to the ER, do not pass GO, do not collect $200...

Yikes... Well this story is going on longer than expected, BUT for reasons beyond my control I had to undergo basically an almost complete colon removal surgery... The doctors said that I could've died from sepsis like soldiers on the battlefield getting shot and their inner guts poisoning their insides. YIKES. They couldn't believe that I had no fever, or hadn't been throwing up for 3 days straight.



The recovery was long and difficult, but the main reason I'm telling this story is to make sure that if ANYONE has ANY kind of strange abdominal pain, to please get it checked out immediately!!!!! It could possibly save your life... I feel pretty certain that it saved mine. 

This would only be of mild interest to people in this DS community... Slightly humorous. So I thought I'd share...

I work for a logistics/delivery company here in Houston. At the moment we have an employment ad running for drivers. Basically for 3 different types of positions. Pickup truck, flatbed truck or 18-wheeler. The response calls that come in are routed to the appropriate department depending on what type of vehicle they have. To save time for the receptionist I (being the genius that I am) devised an easy way to route the calls to the appropriate department based on who the caller asks for. i.e. the names in the ad according to vehicle type.

For pickup trucks they ask for Grayson. For flatbeds they ask for Jamison. For 18-wheelers they ask for Quentin...

So basically throughout the day echoing through the warehouse you hear, "Quentin you have a call on line 4!!!" or "Jamison you have two lines holding!!!" It just gives me a chuckle when I hear that because those are fairly unusual names anyway...

I could only imagine hearing "Victor Fenn-Gibbon line 2!" I tried to keep it as simple as possible while still secretly prolonging the joke. A couple of people here know where the names are from, but most are totally oblivious.

Call count for this week:  Grayson-65 calls, Jamison-32 calls, Quentin-28 calls.

On a serious note, the economy seems to be picking up that's why we need more drivers. Probably half of the calls though are from people who are out of work that used to work in other industries and are now looking for a change. Hopefully things will continue to improve as our volume is up over last year at this same time.

Everyone have a happy Easter!!!!!  
RQ