Yet I Happen to Think the 13th is Lucky

July 13th has been a weird anniversary for me the last year or so.

On that date in 2003, after spending days unable to breath properly or sleep or lie down or eat because of a terrible pain in my rib, I started a journey of what would become about three weeks in ICU with a rare condition that exacts an extremely high mortality rate; the few who survive generally spend 2-3 weeks in a drug-induced coma while they are forcibly ventilated.

Luckily, both due to my doctors and the medical staff along with my general cussedness, I managed to escape the drug-induced coma but I had more hardware coming out of my lung than I'd like to remember and oxygen being force fed at high levels of pressure.

Strangely enough, that's when this blog was born. I was on deadline when I took ill, so I insisted my laptop be brought to me while I was laid up. When I went south and almost died on my third night in the hospital and I got transferred to ICU and then had emergency surgery right there in ICU later the same night, the laptop happened to go with me.

In England, David Kelley had just died and there were lots of questions as to whether it was a suicide or not. Back then, there was already a lot of poorly lit evidence the Iraq war was cooked. Hours after my surgery, high as a kite on Demerol, I crawled out of my bed and got my laptop. I logged on to check Skippy, Media Whores, Atrios, Daily Kos, and Talking Points Memo to see what they were saying about Kelley and WMD and Iraq.

Over the next few days, blogs became my lifeline to reality. Brain damage is a common part of the illness I had, but I was convinced that if I could get online and read and comprehend, my brain wasn't gone just yet. Doctors and nurses kept trying to take the laptop away - I was also working on manuscripts - but I refused to let it go. I'm sorely convinced that had I not had the blogs, and my work, I wouldn't have survived. I also made a vow to myself that if I survived, I was going to become a voice trying to ask and answer the tough questions, to stand up and speak out regardless of the cost. Oh yeah, and I also promised to quit smoking.

So here I am, two years later. Unfortunately, every single breath I have taken in those two years brings horrible, horrible pain that neither drugs nor therapeutic massage nor meditation does anything to alleviate. Yet I work, I get around, I blog, I live. And I don't smoke. ;)

We now return to our regularly scheduled lies, scandal, and quagmires, already in progress.