Thank you so much for all your caring comments and e-mails. You will never know how much they meant to me.
Right now I'm sitting in a Kaiser Hospital in San Diego. I called the Kaiser Nurse on Monday and she said to drive to the closest emergency room, so I went into Blythe. I was there all night, from around 8:30 pm to 7:30 am Tuesday. I had a weird diagnosis that I won't go into, because it was wrong. I stopped at Quiet Times to pick up a package, dropped off my library books, dumped tanks and filed the water tank, and was driving out toward the 95 to go back to La Posa West when my phone range. It was my doctor from San Diego. She said the radiologist at the Blythe ER had gone over my CT scans again this morning, and he had misdiagnosed the pictures, and my doctor wanted me to drive to the nearest Kaiser ER right now.
I told her I was in Arizona, the nearest Kaiser ER was in San Diego, but I'd rather be there, because that's were I'm from and my son is there with his family, and they can take care of Katie. I never went back to my campsite, just left everything there and started driving. I called my neighbor Hazel, who has been great, and she will take care of things for me.
It took five hours to get to San Diego and I was still feeling okay. My doctor said if I started to get ANY stomach pain I was to drive to the side of the road, call 911 and have an ambulance drive me immediately to the closest ER. That gave me more confidence - to have her permission to do that, and still try to get to San Diego. There was some worry about an intestinal rupture. We stopped once for gas and potty for Katie, and Arrived early evening in the ER check in, where we waited for hours to be seen.
Kaiser Zion ER is the only Kaiser ER in the entire San Diego area, so, although it's large, it's really busy and constantly moving people in and out. From what I was told, they planed to build another hospital with an ER in South San Diego, but were not allowed to, unless the opened up the ER to the people in the area that don't have insurance, and let them use it. Kaiser declined. You can imagine what would have happened - but I don't want to be political on my blog, so...
I was finally seen, they did another CT scan of my abdomen, and scheduled me for immediate surgery, where they took out a foot of my lower intestine, which was incorrectly shaped, or something weird. (While they were in there, the doctor told me later, they also removed my appendix.) I'm just now feeling pretty "with it" so I need to get more info from my doctor. Nothing else wrong, no cancer or anything like that. So, surgery around 1:30 Thursday night (Friday morning) and it's now Monday at 8 a.m. I'm still having a problem getting around, but MUCH better than before.
I think I'm going home tomorrow, and I'll be at my son's house in their guest room. I'm thinking when I feel better I can live in his front driveway in The Palms - using the couch as a bed - until I'm back to normal and then find a place to stay around San Diego for a while. I know it can take up to a year to totally recuperate from major surgery and I want to take it easy.
So that's it. It really was something, just not appendicitis, and now - thank goodness - it's been fixed.
Again, thank you for all your concerns, I'm definitely on the upswing now and will post again soon with another update.
From Me and My Dog, have a great Monday everyone! :)
Full-timing in our 24-foot 2006 Forest River Sunseeker 2200 as of June 1, 2011, I've added solar panels and a catalytic heater so that we can camp off-grid comfortably. My dog, Katie, is great company. We traveled a bit in the Western States our first year, and visited the deserts of Arizona and most of the New Mexico State Parks the next four. This year - 2016 - I'm hoping to find a park model to buy so we will have a home base, but we'll continue to travel, too. What a life! :)
