Long-Winded Aren’t I?

I tend to be a long-winded person. I can’t just tell one little story I have to tell big long stories. For example my award-winning article “The Reunion” was actually put together from a series of individual posts on a forum on CompuServe way back in 1986 before anyone ever heard of the word “blog”.

So although this is a blog made up of individual blog entries, more often than not each entry is not a standalone article. Each is in fact mini-chapter in a much longer essay. In the links below are some pages which are indexes showing you all of the posts in one of these multipart blog stories. This should help you read the stories in the proper order without interruptions because occasionally I do right tiny little standalone blog entries that are not part of some larger work.

  • My First Surgery — In 2006 I was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery for a ruptured intestine. Given all of my other health problems this was a very big deal. Read this series of articles about my adventure.
  • Paul McCartney in Concert July 14, 2013 — On that date I attended a Paul McCartney concert with my friends Judy and Anne Chapman. Anne took some wonderful photographs of the concert. Unfortunately my camera had broken. Like all emotional experiences in my life, I feel like I have to write about them in this one was no exception. The nine part article linked below are my remembrances of this wonderful bucket list event along with a good sampling of Anne’s photographs and other images. I hope you enjoy it.
  • “Pray That They Listen to the Man with No Voice” — I spent much of December 2016 in St. Vincent Hospital with severe respiratory distress that led to the insertion of a trach tube. The biggest problem was the fact that I could not talk until late in the process of recovery. It led me to issue a desperate prayer request “Pray that they listen to the man with no voice”. In this series of more than a dozen blog posts I recount that story in detail. What led me to make such a desperate prayer request? What sequence of events turned this normally upbeat person into one filled with angst and despair? What does this experience tell us about the way patients are treated differently when they are unable to speak their mind and participate in their own health care decisions? These are the issues discussed in the blog posts below. I hope you enjoy them.