Undisclosed location - Tuesday 20 August 2024 20:05:15 1724202315

Same undisclosed location - Saturday 27 December 2025 15:21:43 1766870503

The first date is the old version and I decided to trim it down a bit and let the records do the talking.

OK, here's what it's all about. Five years ago next 15 January (2026) I was in an ambulance being transported from one hospital to another. I didn't know it or anything else - I had been in a coma of some sort - induced mostly - for a month having arrived at the first hospital on 15 December of 2020. Seems they figured I was a goner (at least one that would that never wake up or do so in a lucid state) and dumped me in a facility that rejoiced in the grandiose name of Arkansas Continued Care Hospital of Jonesboro. That would be Jonesboro, Arkansas. I had already been to a hospital in Paragould - where I resided at the time - for just a few hours before my second ambulance trip of the day to Saint Bernards (referred to by some - primarily those who have some experience therewith - as Saint Barnyards) in Jonesboro. There a recommended operation was performed - to prevent a heart attack - and eight and forty hours or so later I had a heart attack. Go figure.

Things went from bad to worse as some say and I ended up not breathing while the pump wasn't going and by the time they got me somewhat fixed up they had already called my next-of-kin (having been told that I was in reasonably good shape they had gone home to attend church) and told them that I had in fact expired - or words that were taken that way. After they returned to the hospital and found that I was alive one or two of the hospital staff commented that I was unlikely to be functional if I ever woke up.

I didn't wake up for a couple of months more but that was because they continued pumping chemicals into me and it seems that the plan was that I shouldn't. I was in the third hospital - to use the term very loosely - and where I very nearly died. It seems a lot of people did die there and I have some ideas as to why.

The second hospital (I was only in the first one for a few hours before they decided I needed a service they didn't provide but it was long enough for them to do a procedure with a dye that wrecks the kidneys in some people - guess who is one of those people) had me for exactly one month if you assume the fifteenth of one month to the fifteenth of the next is exact enough. They they farmed me out to a rehab facility that grandiously styled itself a 'long term acute care hospital'. Actually it was a long term care hospital as defined in the law and in any case if one is acutely ill for very long one is likely to be dead if no improvement occurs.

If you know Jonesboro you are probably aware of the decrepit old hospital over on what I still call Stadium just because even though it was renamed Red Wolf like a bunch of other stuff around here. It had been a full-service hospital and had a helicopter pad and all but had been out of business for a good while. A good while being quite a few years - it was briefly reopened and used by the big Baptist outfit while they built their new one over on Johnson. It's real nice, I've been in there not as a patient but visiting other patients and it's also much newer than Saint Bernards. It's also closer to the first hospital by about fifteen minutes on a good day as when you come in from Paragould you go by it first and the ambulance can just hang a right and roll right up to the ER. Going to Saint Bernards is a few more miles but it's miles of narrow and usually congested streets. And my condition was acute, remember? I wish they had done so but this is the Medical Industry and they don't do what's best for the patient. They do what's best for the bottom line.

OK, so they got me in some incognizant condition - I don't know why as I haven't read the records to see what kind of chemicals they were putting in me but I didn't wake up the whole time or for quite a while after I got to the new "hospital". I do know what they put in me there and statistically I shouldn't have survived but my family members got suspicious and looked at the medication and demanded that the doctor reduce them sufficiently to allow me to enter a cognizant state.

I was still hazy but the constant hallucinations of the past months stopped. That's when I saw I was tied with clothesline wire and strips of bedding to the bed and they only released one of my hands once in a while to get me to sit up and take some medicine instead of putting it in the tube. Some of it anyway, some still went in the tube. The place was filthy, the people were mostly pretty grubby. The food was awful and about the only thing to drink was apple juice which makes me puke to there was that. The other adventures - my family trying to get another rehab joint to take me and none would because the doctor told them I was violent and all and finally they told the doctor they they were taking me home and to get me into an ambulatory condition. I was then about five months of being horizontal with no physical therapy so that took a few days but finally the day came when about three of them held me and the walker until we got to the exit and a waiting car.

In the past four years I have restored my physical condition to almost what it was before. Some of the effects of the drugs are apparently not reversible and little things like walking and talking and stuff are often difficult. I am alive though, and at last count I know of 150-something former patients who are not.