The Key To Mexico
A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks. The leg, which the doctor used to do the angiogram, got worse instead of better. A raised line appeared that was warm to the touch along with a lot of pain. I figured it was blood clots from the angiogram. I also figured they were not dangerous because they were in an artery. If they broke loose, they would just be swept down my leg and get caught in the capillaries where they would eventually break apart. After a few days, though, the pain increased and the line got longer, so I made an appointment to see the cardiologist who had done the angiogram.
I went to the doctor and he said I had plebitis, which is blood clots in the veins. He said it was dangerous because if the clots broke loose, they would hit the heart or lungs. Since this started immediately after the angiogram, I was not too happy with the doctor. He gave me prescriptions for an anti-inflammatory, an antibiotic, and a strong blood thinner called Fraxiparine, which I was to inject into my stomach once a day for the next ten days.
I had a taxi drop me off at one pharmacy near our house and got the anti-inflammatory and the antibiotic, but they had no Fraxiparine. By this time the pain was so intense that I could hardly walk. The thought of taking a taxi from one pharmacy to another was not at all appealing. Fortunately there was one other pharmacy nearby which I walked to even though the people at the first pharmacy assured me that the other pharmacy would not have any Fraxiparine in stock. Fortunately they were wrong. I was able to buy one box with two syringes inside.
I managed to hobble home - forgetting to buy any rubbing alcohol to sterilize my skin for the injection. Maybe I could use some tequila, I thought. I rummaged around in the bathroom and came up with a bottle of Bactine, which is an anesthetic as well as an antiseptic. Maybe it would make the injection easier.
I lined up the instruments on the table in our living room. I had never done an injection in my life. I was scared and all alone. I used the computer to call Mary, who was still in the States, and bitched at her for not being there. I guess I just wanted to let her know what was going on in case something went wrong. I read the warnings on the back of the box of syringes. It said that Fraxiparine was only to be administered in highly specialized hospitals. Oh great.
I squirted Bactine on my stomach with a napkin to catch the overflow. I waited a minute to let the anesthetic do its thing. I really had no idea on how to do the injection, so I decided to angle the needle so that the medicine would be deposited just under the skin. I took a deep breath and started pushing the needle in. The skin depressed, but the needle didn’t break through. I increased the pressure and rotated the needle a bit. Finally, it bit through. I pushed down on the plunger and watched the level of the liquid go down. When the syringe was empty I pulled the needle out of my body - one down - nine more to go.
I did some research on the Internet and found out that it is critical to apply compression in cases of deep vein phlebitis. Otherwise you can get skin ulcers years later because of lack of circulation. I walked back to the pharmacy and got the biggest elastic bandage I could find and wrapped my leg from hip to ankle.
I also learned from the Internet how to do the injection correctly. You need to pinch up the skin a bit and inject straight into the belly. The doctor had told me nothing. I was pissed off. Fortunately Mary arrived at the airport the next day. She even pointed out that it was necessary to make sure the syringe had no air bubbles before using it. I was amazed to see that every syringe I used after the first one had air in it. Mary has always hated and feared doctors. I'm beginning to see her point. They kill people.
The blood clots finally broke up under the onslaught of the Fraxiparine and I seem to be ok. The same cannot be said of the White Bullet, however. Gaskets had melted, letting water into the cylinders. The heads had warped and needed to be reground. Then we got a call from the garage that we needed a new radiator.
On both sides of the radiator there was a plastic cap that allowed the water to circulate from one cooling fin to the next. Instead of using metal for such a high temperature application, the manufacturer had chosen to use plastic instead. It probably saves two dollars on the cost of manufacturing the car. The plastic had cracked and lost coolant. Since there wasn't enough coolant, the temperature regulator had quit functioning. My car's engine had suffered major damage because the manufacturer wanted to save two dollars. Damn you penny pinchers at Pontiac!
Mary and I hope to get the White Bullet back in just a couple of days. The garage is having someone custom manufacture a new replacement radiator. It will have metal end caps. It has to be custom manufactured because, even though the garage is a GM dealership, it has no way of getting parts from the US.
The garage is giving us a ninety-day warrantee. I'm going to drive the White Bullet for thirty days and then decide whether to take her back into the States and sell her. Mary and I don't want to do that, but operating a ten-year-old car in a country where you can't get parts is just too risky.
After Mary got back, my friend Sam and I built a new computer for me. We went to a couple of wholesalers to buy the parts. The general public can't buy there, but Sam can. He picked out this and that - a case, a sound card, a motherboard, a cpu, a hard drive, some memory, one thing after another. We went back to his apartment with all our boxes where he proceeded to put everything together.
The most interesting thing was that he used a plastic syringe to apply a heat transferring paste to the cpu chip. Then he fastened some cooling fins to the chip with some retainer clips - squishing the paste between the fins and the CPU. The CPU runs so hot that the fins are necessary to keep it from burning up.
We installed the necessary software and fired up the computer. Everything worked. Even Sam was surprised. We took the machine back to the house that Mary and I rent and hooked the machine up to the Internet via a cable modem (which took me almost two months to get installed). Once again everything worked.
I had opted to get nothing but the best for my new computer. It has a half a gigabyte of memory, a very fast seventy-plus gigabyte disk drive, a video card that can do mpeg compression on the fly, a 16x CD burner, a DVD player, and a state of the art sound card that feeds Dolby sound into four digital speakers and a subwoofer. The machine is state of the art. The mp3 songs, that I can download from the Internet faster than I can listen to them, never sounded so great. Life is good.
I had virtually died when I had my heart attack. For forty-five minutes I had no pulse or breathing. If I hadn't collapsed in a hospital waiting room I would have died. A doctor refused to let me die. He kept on shocking me, trying to get my heart started again. Finally, just as they were about to declare me dead, they saw a muscle in my face twitch. That experience changed my outlook on life. I decided that I had been given an overtime bonus in life. I decided not to postpone anything ever again.
I had always wanted to live in Mexico. Almost from the first minute I met her, I realized that Mary was my key to Mexico. She spoke Spanish and had lived there for ten years. It cost me custody of my daughter because she didn't want to live in Mexico, but I was willing to pay whatever was necessary to follow my dreams. I had sacrificed for my children for twenty years and I had read that 10% of all the people with congestive heart failure die each year. Mary made my dreams possible. Life is good because of Mary.