It turns out things JUST KEPT HAPPENING.

A quick rundown, and then I’ll elaborate on some of it:

• I am officially off inhalers, though I need one.

• My feet are still swelling, and yesterday I was in bed all day because they were so swollen I was worried

• I am having side effects to a lot of the meds: headaches, insomnia, dry mouth, foot swelling, fluid retention, appetite loss or an increased appetite, and weight changes

• It looks like I will need a pacemaker at some point

• We head to Vanderbilt in September - my appointment is September 14th

• My doc has found me an anxiety med that seems to be working. Huzzah!

• Neurologist has given me the green light to take a higher dose of my migraine meds, since I can’t take one of my other meds at the moment

• Diabetes numbers are solid, and it’s very well controlled

• Hearing loss I’ve noticed since the beginning of the year was finally diagnosed as “conductive hearing loss”, which means inflammation or congestion I had during the flu is probably the culprit - hearing aids will not help

I think that’s it. I may need to amend this later. Ha!

The 3 biggest issues (or things I am worried about/dreading) are, in order:

1. Vanderbilt consultation

2. Feet swelling

3. Respiratory treatment

4. Pacemaker

So, let’s talk about it.

There is a VERY VERY LOW chance that Vandy might decide I need to go ahead and have a heart transplant NOW, to allow my liver to regenerate and negate the need for a double transplant. Honestly, I don’t know what happens if that’s the case. I’m praying it’s not. At minimum, that would like a very long stay in Nashville, if not a temporary move. How temporary? Well, John was going to have a waiting list of at least 3ish years, most likely, and that was for a kidney. So. Don’t love that. I have prayed and prayed that we will get up there and they will say, “You can probably go 15 years or so.” Then, by the time 15 years has passed, maybe they’ll be able to 3D print me a heart, or do it outpatient or something, LOL. I feel like I cannot get to anything until after that appointment. I feel like my life is kind of on hold. I wish I could not worry about it, since I have no control over it, but it’s always just right there, and as we get closer to the date we leave, the more I feel a pit in my stomach. Super cool. Snail mail or check-ins in mid-September would probably be a not-so-terrible idea, fam.

This foot swelling thing has been going on foreverrrrrr. I believe that it’s (mostly) a side effect from one of my new meds. That’s the other thing, we are on a merry-go-round with meds. New things, dosage changes, additions. It’s a lot. I know that another main component is this egregious heat. I cannot WAIT for winter. Truly. Yesterday, things got bad enough that I took the day off, stayed home, and laid in bed with my feet elevated for 99% of the day. By this morning they looked normal, but began to swell slightly late in the day. I’m back home now with my feet up. It’s a pain in the ass.

The thing that I’ve kind of shoved into a corner because there’s no great solution, but could become a long-term issue is the fact that my respiratory team and I have basically eliminated all inhalers as working for me/being safe for me to take. I think the next step is a daily nebulizer med that I would do every day. Again, a real pain in the ass. I don’t know what else to do, so that’s the plan I’ve asked my provider about for right now. Still working out the details.

The pacemaker is a thing I tend to forget about because it’s not URGENT, and I could probably go quite a while without it, but there’s an extremely high likelihood that it will be needed. I DO qualify for the “leadless” pacemaker, which I don’t understand at all, but it should make things much easier and my recovery easier as well. I think my doc will let me put that off until early next year, barring no heart events or syncope. Just one more thing to add to the never-ending medical gauntlet. I’d like to get back to the point I was at a while ago, where I only saw the inside of a hospital for emergency or surgical treatment maybe once a year.

I am tiiiiiired. I am working to have consistent normalcy, and keep trucking. There are days I just go to bed though to let my body rest. There are good things happening, though, and I try to lean into those things:

• It is slow going, but Charlie is inch-by-inch integrating herself into our lives. We’re all still learning, but things are going pretty well, honestly

• Andy and I have moved forward on some projects for my house, and his house is for sale (PLEASE SHARE, it needs to sell!), which has taken a very wee bit of the stress off him

• I am reading a TON. I think I’ve read 16 books since May, which is more than I’ve read in any year since probably 2018, maybe 2019

• My office has been an AMAZING support - having not had that in previous jobs, I am so grateful I have it now

• I’ve also gotten incredible support from my church family, which probably wouldn’t have happened a couple years ago with all the spiraling drama.

• I got my craft room/office rearranged and it is now working approximately 400% better for me - I’ve been journaling, crafting and working in there and it makes me happy

• I’ve gotten to see the “babies” quite a bit, and took the 10-year-old and 5-year-old to the fireworks show solo this year

Things are a real mix of ordinary, tired, dread-filled and happy, and I don’t think that will change any time soon. Hoping by October (the big bad month) I am in a better place. Take care of yourselves, and each other.

I’ve been telling people I’m about 85%, but there are days I’m closer to 60%.

I am back at work, which I feel like has helped my mental health IMMENSELY. That came with some other issues though. My feet keep swelling, I still have no voice, and I’m a lot more tired after a day at work than I was when I was home.

Things that have popped up: foot swelling, low potassium, upset stomach, and continuing voice loss.

For the feet, they’ve put me on a diuretic. That’s fine, but I also kind of hate it because I have to pee approximately every 2.3 seconds. Blurgh. Things are going better though, so I’m hopeful I can stop that in a couple weeks.

Went for my follow-up with my cardiac team. They had me wear a monitor and took quite a bit of blood. Heart seems to be doing all the right things, but my potassium was loooooow. The horse pills they have given me for that seem to be upsetting my stomach. So one issue down, a new one in its place.

My voice is the most concerning thing right now. Doc is now afraid I’ve actually damaged my vocal cords. I have an appointment with my ENT in two weeks. Hoping they tell me I’m going to be ok.

Talking over it with my parents, we now believe this may be happening because of placement of a feeding tube when I was in post-op. It’s just getting really old. Like REALLY OLD.

Although the girls and Andy are probably enjoying my inability to scream at them. LOL.

Other small things that are annoying me at the moment: fatigue, sleep disturbance, weight loss, and more headaches and some vertigo because they’ve taken me off one of my main headache meds. They’re still adjusting all meds, so that’s fun, too.

I can tell I AM getting better though, and that’s mostly because I am making plans and feeling like I want to do things.

It came up several weeks ago with mom (before the ablation, I think), that I have been coming to terms with the fact that I have not been “okay” or myself for probably about 2 years or so. Between the move, the Covid, the long Covid last year, the flu at Christmas, and now all of this cardiac shit, I am just really in a different place than I was, even after John died.

One of the agents at work, who had a massive heart surgery last year, came up to me at the meeting we had Tuesday and said, “it’s going to feel so good to FEEL GOOD,” and I realized I hadn’t even thought about a time when I may actually feel BETTER than I did before the ablation. Still being in the fallout stage means that I am trying to get back to baseline, and as luck would have it, my baseline may look a little different - in a good way - once everything else is resolved.

For now I am just over here, tracking symptoms, drinking a ton of water, sleeping and napping as best I can, and setting a goal of feeling like myself again by Christmas.

Thank you all for all the prayers, support, check-ins and time you’ve given to me and my family. I love you all so much.

So, Al, how you feeling?

Like I’ve been pulled through a knothole backwards. This is a long and rambling one, folks.

I am up. I am walking (still using the walker cause every once in while I have a moment of unsteadiness). I am much better than I was around this time last week.

Still. Hoo boy. My body’s bruises and reactions and scabs from IVs and all the other things are healing, and I swear they get worse before they get better. It helps that the little dogs seem to know exactly where I am MOST bruised, and they find one of those spots, step on it, then place all their weight on it. It’s diabolical.

New issues that I’ve had to call my team in for: insomnia, leg pain, continued hoarseness, and body temperature disregulation.

What a person with C-PTSD has a hard time explaining is how their brain kind of goes, “Uh oh” when first presented with a trigger. In my case, the trigger was bad enough that my brain also kind of shut down. So, now, having evaluated during the event that everything was supposed to go smoothly and did not, my brain is now trying to avoid “missing something” again, and therefore I have fear rise up in me about every little thing.

So the lack of sleep, the throat pain and hoarseness, body temp deregulation and the leg pain, each, in turn, made my brain go, “Well, you’re not getting past me, so I’m going to decide this is going to kill me, and then let Ali handle the rest.”

The emotional and mental part of this has been just as rough, if not moreso, as the physical part. Thanks to several different facets of my overarching medical team, I have realized I am not going to die. Still, it took several days. Now, I’m exhausted, and with an increase to my sleep med dosage was finally able, last night, to get a solid night’s sleep. That was slightly tainted this morning by my leg choosing violence because I hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night, and thus had missed a Tylenol dose.

I am, on paper, doing just fine. I am up and walking, I’m not having palpitations, I have a slightly upset stomach, but that’s unsurprising, and the hoarseness IS improving. I just have to rest my voice more than I care to.

Two nights ago (the night that instigated a call to my psychiatrist re: sleep meds), I had a full-blown panic attack. I cannot remember the last time that happened. I got through it, and am now working on exercises my therapist sent for nervous system regulation.

Any time something like this happens, I feel like it takes my brain about a week to catch up - on everything. Typing texts has been fun because I realize after I’ve sent them that I left whole words out or badly misspelled something. I have also lost a lot of words. Like a lot.

The one thing that has pleasantly surprised me is that I am reading. After I got my brain back online, somewhere around Friday, I think, I picked up the book that I’d brought to the hospital. I finished that one Sunday or Monday and finished my next one last night. Started on number three…

As it happens, since John died, I have hardly read. If you’ve known me a while, you know that’s very odd for me. When I was a kid, my parents would entice me out to social events with “you can bring your book” if I was in the middle of one that I felt like I couldn’t walk away from at that moment. That hasn’t been the case in a long time. I think I finished one novel last year. Possibly two. (I also can’t watch the office anymore, which is a sad thing but one that I’ve let myself be ok with. Maybe someday.)

I’m REALLY working on that currently and the other night I asked Andy if we could start date night after I’d finished my book. Hashtag winning! :)

Some days I feel like I’m never going to feel like myself again. With six months made up of the flu, atrial fibrillation, the cardioversion and now this, I can understand why I feel that way. Still, my logical brain can’t make headway at the moment.

I KNOW I am getting better. There’s just a lot going on, and when everything is trying to come back online after something this, there are days that you feel like you’ve been pulled through a knothole backwards.

I’ve done harder things before and survived, so I keep trying to remind myself of that.

Shoutout to this week’s support team as well: my parents, Andy, Amanda, Susie, JonaKay, Stephanie, Kathe, Vicki, Wendy and Fr. Kirk. Your love and willingness to help out, especially since Saturday, are so very appreciated.

Thank you all for loving me. I love you, friends.

I am alive, I am home, I’m pretty functional for a person that came home from a 5-day hospital stay earlier today.

I am not okay, I am not going to recover for awhile, and I’ve had another experience with the thought, “I guess I just WON’T die.” Is that God's stubbornness or my own? I can see it going either way, honestly.

What happened: My ablation lasted over 12 hours, and when they tried to get me out and awake, I was having blood pressure, rhythm, and fluid retention issues. [Before I move on, I will say the ablation itself went very well. We’ve got a 4-D map of heart, my doctor was able to look at my pressures and my liver, and overall he is very pleased with that he found.]

I ended up being shocked, then intubated. It was a lot.

I had a WONDERFUL nursing staff in ICU and the first night I had one named Anna that was amazing, kept in contact with Dr. Shah pretty much continually, and got me through the night. Tuesday after no sleep or food or water, I started fighting what I would truly call delirium. Images anytime I closed my eyes, a pretty constant feel of floating, and sleep was impossible.

Wednesday they took out the tube and I was finally able to get someone to tell what the fuck had happened. I was SO ANGRY on Tuesday (and still not really with it) because I kept asking what happened and they were telling me a few details but I wanted to know WHHHHY I was in the ICU, because frankly I was afraid I was dying.

The delirium included hearing things, and I asked about a couple things I heard people say while I was “down”, and none of them were actually said.

Wednesday I finally slept some during the day, and most of the night, and things pretty much went up from there. I was able to get up and get in a chair, too, which helped me mentally gauge where I was at with movement, walking, etc.

Thursday they had me walk the hall. Friday I spent most of the day watching a Harry Potter marathon, and I ate some actual food.

Which brings us to today. I am very bruised, have several wounds from IVs, and skin burn from the adhesives on all the stickers they had to put on me, and I was nervous to come home. I also don’t quite have regular voice or voice volume because of the intubation. That part may be the most annoying part of this, honestly.

I have showered. I have eaten. I’ve had water.

This one was a bugger, and my body is going to take some time. I will not be “out in society” for quite some time, and returning to work Monday isn’t a thing.

I will be open to visitors starting next week sometime (probably Tuesday), I just ask that you call first. I’d love to see people, just know it ain’t pretty over here.

Love you all. Thanks for loving me.

This is a “normal” ablation, but just like everything, nothing is quite normal for me. As it stands, the plan/hope is that I go in there tomorrow, they find all the areas they need to ablate, they ablate them all, and I come home late Tuesday. There are two ways this could go kinky, only one of which would necessitate a longer hospital stay:

1. They do not get all areas ablated. That means they get what they can, they send me home, I continue to take some meds they’d rather I be able to quit taking, and we do this again in a little while.

2. They get in there and find that I need a pacemaker. If I qualify for something called a “leadless” pacemaker, the hope is that I’d stay a couple extra days, they’d put that in, I’d be in recovery for that for a bit, and still be home before the end of the week if there weren’t complications. If I need a regular pacemaker, we’d be looking at a bigger surgery down the line that my cardiologist stated would be “a much bigger undertaking,” and frankly, I am not even entertaining that possibility.

So, full ablation, with leadless pacemaker if ABSOLUTELY necessary, or bust, as I see it.

I feel okay physically tonight. Being off some of my meds has caused a headache. I also have some stomach upset. I don’t know if that’s due to med changes, what I’ve eaten, anxiety, or in response to the headache, but it’s pissing me right off. Ha! I’m also fatigued but that has been the norm for quite a while.

People have asked today about my mental health and honestly I just want this over with. I think my chaotic experience with the cardioversion has made me feel like this will inevitably be chaotic and while my brain knows practically that that is probably incorrect, can’t really kill my nervous system’s reaction to that fear. So. To combat some of that, I’ve drawn up a “care plan” for my nurses, etc. to hopefully prevent some of the miscommunication that happened during my last visit.

My support team has shown up. I am smothered and covered in prayers and offers of help, and my family (especially Andy and my mom) have worked to make sure I come home to clean home with all the chores done and don’t have to do much of anything to keep the household going.

We still have Sparkle, and I’ve let everyone know that will be a situation that I deal with after I get home and I’m feeling 100%. She’s going to need to go to events and maybe go to some dog-friendly places around town and I can’t do that right now and I’m too in love with her to let anyone else do it (#typea).

So that’s where I’m at. There is SO MUCH I want to do. Shit I’ve been trying to do for two years, or longer than that. Lately, I find myself more and more wondering what would happen if I woke up one morning and just got on a plane to Scotland and started over. Is this crazy talk? Probably. Is it nice to think about a different reality where I could be an expat in a gorgeous country with nothing to do but enjoy it? Yep.

There are some days my only thought is burning it all down.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for loving me. I’ll see you on the other side.

For a very very long time, 40 was kind of the age I thought of as my “expiration date”. That’s because it kind of was for those of us who had been through this kind of chd and the subsequent surgeries. They just didn’t think or know that we’d live that long. I think I’ve dreaded getting here for so damn long, that now that I’m here, still standing, even with the things that are feeling scary, I’m just really glad I made it.

I think your view on aging changes, too, when you lose your husband when he’s 37. 40 used to kind of feel like the end of the world to me too, because it “was so close to 50”, which in turn, felt close to 60. Not anymore. The love of your life dies at 37 and you realize that 40 ain’t nothin’. So many unrealized and unlived years there. I keep telling everyone, “40 is the new 20”. Also, I don’t know which demon us Millennials sold our souls to (maybe Paul Rudd?), but honey, we don’t look 40 - which only helps.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my body. As a kid I just felt so lucky to be here and afraid to screw it up because it was made very clear to me that I had somehow shirked death and I felt I needed to live a good life to make up for it. As I got older, and realized all the things that were never going to be a part of normal life for me, it got a little harder. After losing John, especially after the years spent trying to get him to the other side of a transplant and failing to do so, I often feel like I can’t catch a damn break, but I also have survivor’s guilt that I’m here and he’s not.

It’s an odd thing, to on one hand feel so grateful that the body you were given has gotten you so far down the road, but also really wish she could get her shit together long enough for you to take a few days off of the constant vigilance of having to make sure she didn’t break down somehow.

Most of my life, my biggest issue has been that I can’t control everything. I sure as hell can’t control a chronically ill body, and it really pisses me off on occasion. So today, well, tomorrow, as I turn 40 with the entire world (not just mine, but like the whole damn thing) on fire and facing a lot of big heavy scary shit, I am working VERY HARD (succeeding? meh.) to remind myself that there have been so.very.many. times in my life where I just knew things were gonna go one way and they went a completely different direction, and instead of wishing I was in control of all of the outcomes of these upcoming scary things, I’m working to hype myself up on the possibilities. “Isn’t it so exciting that this could turn out a million different ways? I wonder what will happen. Let’s find out.”

Let’s find out, indeed.

• My cardiologist’s office called to let me know that they had an opening for an ablation on 5/15. I had been cautioned to expect it would probably be late summer before that was able to be scheduled. We are a go for Friday the 15th, with the expectation that I will spend a couple, if not a few days in the hospital, and I have taken off work until after Memorial Day.

• Vanderbilt called me and let me know that contrary to what my entire team had believed, they didn’t want to just silently follow me for now, no, they wanted to see me IN NASHVILLE in the next few months for a complete consult. As of today, those appointments are scheduled for Monday, 9/15. I did this with John when he was first evaluated for transplant (he was waiting for a kidney and liver transplant when he died), and this really is just a “we want our doctors to see you so there aren’t any surprises” but it feels like a big lift for something that is (very hopefully) a long ways off. The hope is that the ablation might push that timeline out even further. I am not letting myself bank on that at the moment.

• I met with an endocrinologist and a nutritionist about the T2D diagnosis and subsequent dietary changes. Right now, my blood sugar is really well controlled, but it’s hard to say if that’s because of the meds they put me on in the hospital, or just because I don’t really have diabetes. What IS a fact is that my blood sugar IS abnormal. The endo is running another set of labs (that I have yet to schedule - this is my reminder to myself to get that done!) and wants me to continue using a Continuous Glucose Monitor, meeting with the nutritionist, and see where we are when labs come back.

So yeah. There’s a lot happening. All of this on top of all the other life stuff that gets in the way of just being able to make sure that all of this is being 100% handled and that I’m taking the very best care of myself. As someone who has learned the hard way that I always need to ask for help, here’s what I need right this second, and in the coming weeks:

• Many of you know I have a foster dog, Sparkle, who has been dealing with a busted tail. Big girl is back at the shelter currently, with a full amputation on the books for next Tuesday. She will be fully adoptable as of that day, but I usually like to keep them about a week to get them off all their meds. Which means she’ll be 100% on 4/28, which leaves me less than 3 weeks to get girlfriend adopted. If she doesn’t get adopted, I’ll need help with care for her the week I’m in the hospital. This is going to be a bigger deal than the cardioversion and I have great people who took care of me AND her last time, and I’d really like them to get a break this time around. BUT ALSO PLEASE JUST SHARE HER EVERYWHERE SO WE CAN FIND HER A FOREVER HOME. Thanks.

• The real big lift, besides the week I’m in the hospital in May, is going to be when I’m back home and trying to go back to work, and trying to take care of the house, groceries, etc. I’m going to need help. I just will. I hate not being able to just do things, but it is what it is. So. I may ask if you’re going to the store to pick up a couple things for me. I may ask if you could come over and sit on my bed while I pay bills or sort meds or do other menial tasks that seem harder to do when everything is a little bit harder. Things like that.

• Happy mail. Always. Snail mail makes me happy. A visit the week I’m in the hospital if you’re around and have the spoons and the immune system to do so. :) Even a phone call or FaceTime date or text. I may be scatterbrained or tired, but I always love getting a minute to chat if I’m up to it.

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you. I love you. Thank you for loving me.

Turns out, that last round of a-fib, which I thought was intermittent, was so absolutely not, and had been ongoing for 10 days when I finally took myself to the ER at OUMed when the “criteria” had been met for an ER visit and I felt like I could handle a hospital stay, because I knew that’s where I was headed.

I had a cardioversion, after a ridiculously long ER stint that solved almost nothing, and may have also gotten me misdiagnosed as a diabetic (more on that later), which ended the a-fib and stabilized things. My medical team also took me off of the beta blocker I’d been on for nearly 20 years, and started me on a new one. They also placed me on a new med that helps me with both heart issues AND diabetes, because my sugars in the ER were “abnormally high” and they diagnosed me with Type 2 Diabetes.

If you’re reading this randomly, and haven’t met me IRL, or know nothing about me, or don’t know a TON about me, you should know that my husband John died in 2020 at 37 from Covid during a hospitalization that started because of complications from Type 2 Diabetes. So I know enough to know that if things looked really wrong, to the point that I have had diabetes for a while, somewhere in the 5-8 blood panels I do a year, someone would have (and should have) caught that. To say I was stunned is an understatement.

Almost as soon as I was out of the cardioversion, my cardiologist (who I trust implicitly) came to talk to me about the probable need for me to have an ablation sooner rather than later, and the probable need for me to go ahead and consult with the team at Vanderbilt in Nashville, TN about an eventual transplant, which is not needed now, but will probably be needed within a 5-year timeline.

Both of those things had been mentioned, multiple times, but to have all of that thrown at me at once, while facing a longer admission, was quite a lot. I did okay with the hospitalization, barring one night when they tried to start YET ANOTHER new med, it messed with my system, I requested it be stopped, and before it was all over I’d had a major anxiety attack.

When I got home, I was faced with the reality of several things at once: I needed to schedule appointments with one of my doctors and reach out to two new teams - one for diabetes and the one at Vanderbilt, I would be waiting to hear on scheduling for an ablation, and I would need to change my diet and start paying attention to my body a bit more. Plus, I still had to keep up with all my other docs: neuro, pulmonology, liver, PCP, etc.

I spent several days wallowing, and the recovery didn’t go as fast as I thought it would, which made things harder. A couple weeks ago, the ball really got rolling on a lot of this, and since then I’ve been kind of feeling like I’m being pulled along against my will.

Been trying to figure out a way to put one big update out there so that everyone knows where we’re at, and let you all know how I’m feeling and what I may need as we go. Thus, here we are on substack.

Breaking this into a few posts, as to give an overview, catch people up, and give an update on upcoming events and goals. This is the first post in the series.

Where We’ve Been

A quick recap: When I was born, I had a congenital heart defect that required a surgery known as a FONTAN. I was also missing a spleen. We now know that all of this was due to a gene mutation. I had to have a couple revisions to the FONTAN surgery. Today, they don’t do that surgery the same as they did back in the late 80s and early 90s. Today, there is also a lot of things we know about the way that “Fontan Kids” bodies have grown, and some of it isn’t great.

I am an outlier, in that I have had a mostly normal life. Lots of other patients have not. Organ transplants, long-term disabilities, round-the-clock care…there’s a lot that I could have faced that I haven’t, and until I was about 20, my everyday life was not super affected by my health.

I took antibiotics long-term, from the time I was 4 or 5 until I was 18 or so. When I was 17, Complex PTSD symptoms started popping up, though none of us really understood all of that well. Other than that, it wasn’t until I had my first round of atrial fibrillation (a-fib) in…2009? (none of us can remember the exact date - 2005? 2009? Unclear) that things got kind of real.

Since then, I have had 3 more instances of a-fib, two of them this year. We still don’t a consistent cause for all of them, and with the ones this year, they now haven’t all presented in the same way, which has been jarring. This is not unexpected with my history, though. The frequency this year, though, has been a problem.

To run down the rest of the “health shit”: I also have asthma and migraines. In 2013, I had a near fatal case of sepsis, the source of which was never found. That caused some lung damage, which exacerbated the asthma. Living in Oklahoma, I have allergies and am basically allergic to the outdoors. The allergies and the asthma go hand in hand and can make me miserable. Due to the way the surgeries have restructured my heart physiology, I also have liver issues. So yeah. It’s complicated.

The other major issue that comes up with all this is that I’m on a lot of prescription meds, so changing one thing, can set off a whole rabbit hole of, “is this going to mess with this, what about this? Have we thought about this?” I have also developed some reactions to meds that are really helpful and have had to discontinue them (the biggest loss being the largest family of anxiety meds), and an allergy to Nsaids, which were very successful in helping with my migraines. So for now, I don’t have the best options for anxiety, my migraines, or my asthma. It’s exhausting.

This is where we were when I landed myself in the hospital on March 1st. More to come.