AWOL

  I’m afraid I haven’t contributed to our Type M for Murder blogs in much too long.  My initial excuse was a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Galapagos Islands.  That alone will be its own blog somewhere down the line.  While I was aboard the National Geographic ship exploring and hiking the volcanic islands with my wife, I was making notes about a locked door murder.  

It’s a delicious location for a fictional homicide. 

Before flying to the Galapagos, we spent a day exploring Quito, Ecuador.  It’s a colorful, beautiful country.  That in itself is worth a story. 

It was on our trip back, on crowded planes out of Ecuador and Miami that something happened. Something snuck up on me.  Arriving in Raleigh, where we spent the night before driving back to the coast of North Carolina where we live, I developed a cough. 

Worried that I might have contracted something exotic, I saw my health care provider the next day.  Tests came back.  I had bronchitis caused by a rhinovirus…a cold. Heck, that shouldn’t be a problem.  I took the medicine prescribed.

But it got worse.

Here’s where I made a mistake.  I didn’t realize it, but it had gotten so bad that I was suffering from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen.  I thought I was getting better.  I didn’t realize how sick I was getting.  By the time I saw my health care provider again, my oxygen level was at 79 percent.  

They called the EMTs and rushed my butt into the ER. When I got there, my heartbeat was irregular, struggling to find oxygen to send to the rest of my body.  They brought in the crash cart.

One of the people working on me in the ER said, “The crash cart must have scared him.  His heart returned to a normal rhythm.”

At least that’s what I thought I heard.  

I spent the next seven hours undergoing tests and being pumped with oxygen.  The diagnosis was double pneumonia.  Then I spent two days in critical care and five more recuperating slowly in the hospital.  

So, I’m home, thirteen pounds lighter and moving slowly.  But I went to my first writing critique group last Monday.  The first in over a month and I’m going to the grocery store and running errands on my own, so…progress.  

I’m re-editing a manuscript that I’d finished before our Galapagos trip.  While in the hospital, I had some time to think about a lot of things, including my mortality.  This has given me a new perspective and I want to use it to make my manuscript better.  

It’s a chance to look at a lot things with fresh eyes. 

Please accept my apologies for being AWOL and I look forward to joining our Type M family again, hopefully on a more regular schedule.