Illness Update

Just for the few who might be concerned: I'm on the mend. It's been 41 or 42 days but the infection looks to be on the wane. New blood tests from this morning will hopefully allow me to get off antibiotics in another week or so. Dang, I've never been hit like this before. Weak and useless. Watching tv at night just to get my feet up in a lazy-boy my kids bought me for christmas. Watching the trees bloom. But getting better: Walking in the supermarket, and the physical therapist has me walking with my head up, not down, so that I'm striding with more confidence. I did a story for the Fort Worth Weekly, my paper, this week, and loved pushing myself to do it. I have a podcast with the any Mystic next week, and I'm gonna be good for that. My friend, Mike McCoy, who's made a movie about me--More Joy, Less Pain--is having a screening in Dallas in early May an asked me if I'll be well enough to talk/answer questions before the show. I said yes, I'll be strong then.
I will cut grass today and make chicken wings for my ex wife's kids for after school. I'm gonna get strong.
And tody, I'm wearing a very bright blue-green shirt because I feel like a million bucks, relatively speaking.
Just an update for the few who want to know.
And I hope you're all feeling well and enjoying Spring. Ain't it great to be alive?????

Feeding Chickens

Quick note on the chickens out at the Gorman ranchetttttttte....It's called that because in Texas real ranches start at about 10,000 acres and I only tend to 1 1/2. But the note is this: Whenever we have animals, we try to feed them good food. Our dog Boots eats fresh chicken legs or livers and gizzards daily, along with some veggies and good leftovers. Our cats eat cat food but lots of left over stuff. Our pig used to get two heads of lettuce, two heads of cooked garlic in a pot of fresh rice, two loaves of bread, and 8-10 veggies daily, along with oranges, bananas, corn. Now our 8 chickens and two ducks (one male and one female), eat good organic chicken food from the feed store--that's always available to them--but then daily we serve them some oat-bread, some sunflower seeds, raw, some lettuce or spinach, ends of veggies and fruit I've cooked with. Today, for instance, they've got one slice of two-day-old pizza, half a pot of jasmine rice with garlic, a bag of fresh spinach, and three ears of freshly cooked corn with just a touch of salt. There will be more by the time I feed them at 5 PM.

I figure if I cook for myself daily then I should cook for my kids and grandkids and friends daily--even if they don't come over--and the same should go with the animals. And the results are pretty good. We're getting 7-12 chicken eggs and 1-2 duck eggs daily from 8 chickens and one duck. I've never seen or heard of this kind of production.

They also get to run around outside of the large coop a few times a week for an hour or two, looking for bugs, protected from the red-tailed hawks by my daughter Madeleina's two dogs, along with Boots.

And man! Those eggs are good! I mean, to die for!

Slightly Pissed Off at God

I have never been the strongest kid on the block. I never pretended to be. Billy Gerba and a host of kids could beat me up and did. That does not mean I was not strong because I was. I hiked, I biked, I did hundreds of pushups daily, more than 1000 situps daily. Probably the most fun I ever had in my life over the long term was being married to Chepa, playing handball 4 hours a week with Earl the Pearl, doing 140 pushups (two sets of 70) and 2500 situps/crunches (two sets of 1250 each) daily, riding a bike 15-20 miles a day through New York City traffic, and then throwing a football two hours a day three days a week with the fantastic Malcolm MacKinnon, plus playing on the High Times BONGHITTERS softball team as shortstop. While I wrote investigative reporter pieces that helped change laws, sent bad cops to prison, exposed bad federal black ops, and so forth.
And then sickness came. The poison spider, the malaria, the hemmorhagic dengue, the intensine explosion that caused three operations that cost me three years because they cut me open from solar plexis to navel, and finally the flesh eating bacteria that ate half my right foreleg.
So while I don't want to grump, while most people I know get the flu for 3-4 days once every couple of years, right now I'm deep into the new leg bacteria: 6 days in Iquitos, one day travel, four days in Texas, eight days in the hospital, including 3 days in Intensive Care Unit, and now on my 14th day at home with hospital visits three times a week, home nurses twice a week.
Come on. People get sick for a few days. Not 33 days with no freaking end in sight! This isn't normal and I object! if the powers that be want me to be weak, okay, I get it. But what about the 35 years of pushups, sit ups, handball, football, bike riding, Amazon hiking, raising kids?
And then when I am feeling sorry for myself because I am asking people to help me, I remember that there are kids in Yemen, Syria, Honduras, and 50 other places who just lost an arm or leg, or their mom or dad, or who are starving.
Who would make a world like this where kids who are totally innocent would suffer? If I get to heaven and if there is a god, I have some freaking questions.
For the rest of you, I hope you are having a wonderful night, getting kissed by someone you wanted to kiss.
Peace, out. Peter G

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Reminded of fear

I was talking about my reluctance to go into the hospital last week with a friend of mine and my daughter, Madeleina, said: "Dad, I think you always forget that when you were five and in kindergarden you had rheumatoid arthritis and spent between a month and several months (depending on which sister is doing the talking) in the hospital. I think you got hurt by that a lot, so every time you have to go into the hospital you secretly remember being that little helpless, lonely kid in the hospital."
She was right and the tears streamed like a tsunami for an hour. I shut that all out, but when I remember it, I remember that almost every few days they wheeled one of us out with the sheet over their faces cause we were in an experimental ward and kids died. I just buried that, but know that I hate going to the hospital because it feels like prison where I can't get out. Thanks, Madeleina. I will start to incorporate that old pain and try to get rid of it since carrying it around buried so deeply doesn't help at all.
Today I had the first of my follow up appointments to the recent 8 day stay in the hospital and I was sort of throwing up going into it because I was sure the doc was going to keep me there. Wow. I am going back 63 years to those pains. And I am sorry I am being so selfish when there are people with no food, people with no friends, people suffering from wars they have nothing to do with. I would be happy if the universe would fix them all and then, if it has a little more oomph!, could fix me too.

Well, that was freaking frightening

Well, that was scary. I knew I was sick in Iquitos, what with my lower legs all swollen, and the vomiting and such, but I could not isolate what it was until the day I was to get on the plane to come home. Suddenly there were wild chills and teeth chattering and diahhrea and I realized I was in the middle of a relapse of malaria. No big deal, right? I've ridden that storm now and then for a few days for decades. I was, however, a little worried when LATAM said I was too ill to fly. I finally got through and got to Lima.
Boarded my flight to Dallas and assumed I'd sleep. I didn't. Not only didn't I sleep, I had full on bout of ayahuasca for several hour of the flight. The plane ain't the place for that to come on unexpectedly.
Did maintain control till the end and did accept the wheelchair American brought for me. Got out into the street and my son Marco was waiting to take me home. Unfortunately, the chills, hot flashes, visions, hallucinations and the rest of it did not go away.
I took really hot showers and couldn't shake the chills. I forced myself to drink nearly a gallon of water a day. But I knew I should listen to my friend Dian's advice and see a doc.
So I returned Tuesday and saw my doc on Friday morning. He asked if I wanted a day or two in the hospital. I said "no way!" Ten minutes later he said: "I'm the doctor here and you have no say. I'm having you admitted." I asked what would happen if I refused. He said "There is a good chance you will die in the next couple of days." So I was admitted.
They dropped me into ICU, where I stayed three days with massive amounts of antibiotics. Seems my body was way out of whack. Eight docs, all specialists in their fields, took me on and got me from that end of all things and into a regular room where they kept me five more days.
They let me go this afternoon. I start seeing those eight docs again beginning on Monday. If I feel lousy I'll readmit before then.
So I'm better but still bad.
Gonna make it. Still have some work to do here and some more kid raising and a little hell raising.
But I know I'm sick when I'm not reaching for a smoke and don't feel like a glass of wine. Ah well, you all now know as much as I do, except the part where I know how much it hurts.