[Boatanchors] WA7LYO SK
Duane Fischer, W8DBF
dfischer at usol.com
Thu Jan 5 20:11:15 EST 2012
John, (and Whomever)
I had a massive stroke on December 27, 2009. I am 5'10 and weigh 152 pounds.
I was sixty-three at the time. I was an athlete when in high school. I even
had a chance to tryout for the Major leagues with the Baltimore Orioles AAA
farm club, the Aberdeen Pheasants, in Aberdeen, South Dakota. I had worked
out every day of the week for over four years and had all toned muscle,
little, if any, body fat.
All of that went away the night before I turned eighteen in October of 1964.
I was shot by a stranger using a twelve gauge shotgun using #6 shot while I
was standing in my parent's backyard. He was Pheasant hunting in a
residential area! Totally illegal! No matter, when he turned and hip shot he
hit me in the upper chest, neck and face from sixty feet away. So much for
my future with another bird, the Orioles!
Before the sudden and unexpected stroke, I had a total blood cholesterol
level of 149. Well below the norm of 200. My blood pressure was slightly
elevated, averaging 140/80. I was on a low dose of calcium channel blockers
for that.
I took nothing else.
My health was considered by the doctors as excellent for a white male of my
age.
I ate no candy of any kind. I seldom ate any cookies, cake or pie. Never ate
whipped cream, coconut, and so forth. However, I did eat some Cashew nuts
for the Christmas holidays. In moderation, but I still ate the cholesterol
laden things anyhow!
Overall, I was eating healthy, exercising on a regular basis (exercise
bike - going for endurance, not for speed, high repitition with hand weights
(I hate the term "dumbells"!), some moderate physical exercises etc. Push
ups, sit ups etc.
For reasons nobody knows, my blood sugar hit 1,100 and I went into a
diabetic coma. Normally a blood sugar level of 500 puts one into a coma and
often times is fatal. The hospital that I was taken to is a level one trauma
center. They told my daughter that I had the highest blood sugar level of
any patient that survived more then twenty-four hours in the hospital's
records! A title I was glad to be awarded, but I really would just as soon
of not had the stroke to begin with!
Now in June of 2003 I had a colonoscopy that revealed I had a large
cancerous tumor right beside my liver. The upper right descending colon, I
think. I had surgery to remove it on August 15, 2003. Remember that day you
east coast dwellers? The sun fired a CME at the Earth and hit us big time!
It knocked out the power in Canada first and then the failures trickled into
Maine and just kept on going and growing!
I remember hearing about people bringing gallon jugs of filtered water into
the hospital. As well as the entire hospital running on the emergency
generators providing electrical power to the operating rooms, patients
rooms, elevators, kitchen and everywhere else!
So I survived Colon Cancer and a major nine clot stroke. I also was a victim
of the Polio epedemic that hit the uSA in 1952. Nobody knew that I had Polio
until an observant elementary school teacher noticed that I was limping when
I ran. I did suffer muscle injuries from the Polio, however. It caused the
vertebrae in my extreme lower back, the L area, to be diminished in size. I
should have grown to be six feet tall, not five feet nine and one half
inches. The three vertebrae have given me problems as I have gotten older.
Which I knew was going to happen. Unfortunately for me, losing my eyesight
prevented me from doing the kind of exercises that I needed to do to slow
down the progression of the vertebrae disintegration. Overall, however,
unless one was watching my movements closely the problems with my lower back
and legs would go unnoticed.
Now let's add in the appendix problem when I was forty in 1987. Because the
doctors, at least one of them anyhow, were convinced that I had a kidney
stone problem! While they did tests on Saturday and Sunday, my appendix got
worse and worse and ruptured about one hour before they took me into surgery
to remove it! I nearly died from that massive infection! I spent seventeen
days in the hospital.
Oddly enough: Harry Houdini, the Escape Artist, (Enrich Weiss from Appleton,
WI with parents from Hungary), died from a ruptured appendix on October 31,
1926 in a hospital near Detroit, Michigan! Fortunately for this ONLY totally
blind professional Magician/Illusionist in the world, I survived. Primarily
due to having antibiotics available and a Guardian Angel! I wonder if my
Guardian Angel took an early retirement after me?
Now the list keeps going on! A horrific car crash on June 25, 1991 involving
my new Dodge Stealth RT sports car. No, I was not driving at that particular
moment! It was a young lady who was working for me, a very attractive green
eyed female with past her shoulders natural blond hair. Her father was a
Street Machine and muscle car devotee, so he and I got along great! This
girl even had a 1965 Ford Mustang convertible with the 289 CI V/8 Cobra
engine modified for Ford by Carroll Shelby. Oh yes, it had the factory four
on the floor too! Now Wendy was not the best at shifting that beast, but she
was crazy enough to let some totally blind guy we both knew wind that Cobra
mill up on the back country roads and shift when he "heard" the red line on
the tachometer!
Then there was the time in June of 1964 when my 1956 Chevy convertible with
the factory 265 CI power pack engine got sideways on a 90 degree day on some
slicker then snot on a hot playground slide two lane country asphalt road!
The car rolled onto the driver's side door and then onto the top. Slid a few
feet and slammed broadside into an Oak tree with a diameter of three feet+!
It hit the passenger side door right smack in the middle. Fortunately I had
talked my girlfriend, Andrea, out of riding home with me from the annual
Sunday School picnic! It would have killed anyone sitting on that side of
the car.
The only reason that it did not break my neck, was because exactly where the
black canvas roof hit the ground there was a hole! Hence, the canvas could
expand into that hole and act as a shock absorber. Another Guardian Angel
put in for early retirement!
Just for the record: I was not speeding! Even as crazy as I am, and was, I
was only going thirty-five miles per hour as I came into that very slick S
turn! Made no difference though. The car simply skated sideways. All of my
experience from racing zero to seventy MPH in 100 feet Go-Carts did not help
me that time! The only injury that I got was a cut on my right shoulder in
the back where a piece of passenger side window glass cut my skin as I
pulled myself out of the car while lying on my back.
Yes, there are more! But I think you get the drift! I have had a charmed, or
Heavenly protected, life. Sort of like the famed "cat with nine lives".
However, I am either at nine, or maybe it is eight, in either case I am
trying VERY hard not to find out which one it is!
As I mentioned in a prior post: For whatever the reason, males from my
generation seem to have a very high mortality rate from age sixty through
age sixty-nine. If they make it to seventy years old, they seem to be good
to go until their late eighties and into their middle nineties. My
generation consists of the very first crop of baby boomers born in 1946.
Are any of you who are reading this life insurance agents? If so, or if you
have access to the mortality records used by a life insurance company, can
you confirm the unusually high mortality rates I specified above?
If any of you know what caused Greg to become a SK, please tell me. I am
sure going to miss him checking in with another piece of odd gear that he
somehow found and breathed life back into. He seemed to have a knack for
doing that!
Duane, W8DBF
----- Original Message -----
From: "J. Forster" <jfor at quikus.com>
To: "Duane Fischer, W8DBF" <dfischer at usol.com>
Cc: <wrcromwell at gmail.com>; <boatanchors at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 6:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Boatanchors] WA7LYO SK
> The big killers are heart disease, lung cancer, and colon/prostate cancer.
>
> IMO, the reason those who get sick and survive is they get a scare and
> clean up their act.
>
> If you have a heart attack, you learn to watch saturated fat and blood
> pressure.
>
> If you have lung cancer and survive, you stop smoking.
>
> If you get colon cancer, you stop avoiding colonoscopies.
>
> YMMV,
>
> -John
>
> ==============
>
>
>
>> Hi Bill,
>>
>> I am sure that Greg would appreciate the glow of a vintage vacuum tube
>> rig
>> as well as the glow of a candle lit in his memory.
>>
>> What I still do not know is what happened to Greg that resulted in him
>> becoming another SK?
>>
>> Have any of you noticed how many Hams between the ages of sixty to
>> seventy
>> are becoming SK? It is alarming! There is something peculiar about those
>> of
>> us first decade 'Baby Boomers' when it comes to premature mortality! If
>> one
>> lives past sixty-nine, then he/she seems to live into their eighties or
>> nineties. But many of us, way way too many of us, do not make it
>> pastfifty-nine for some reason! Right now as I pen this, I have five
>> close
>> friends in their sixties who are Hams and have a terminal condition!
>> Quite
>> a
>> few others I know had some near fatal injury or illness from sixty to
>> sixty-nine. The survived, but not all recovered to what they would define
>> as
>> "normal".
>>
>> Do they charge extra to have your favorite boat anchor station buried
>> with
>> you? At lease you would have a "good" ground!
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bill Cromwell" <wrcromwell at gmail.com>
>> To: <boatanchors at mailman.qth.net>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 12:17 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Boatanchors] WA7LYO SK
>>
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> It's always sad to lose somebody we know. I recently acquired an R-23
>>> and BC-453 with some helpful notes from him. A previous parts swap with
>>> him included one of his QSL cards. That card has been laying on my
>>> operating table for several weeks. I had been planning to come down that
>>> way in Spring and was thinking of meeting him for coffee or dinner
>>> somewhere. We'll all miss him.
>>>
>>> I'll be lighting a candle for him and his family tonight.
>>>
>>> 73,
>>>
>>> Bill KU8H
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________________________
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>>> List Administrator: Duane Fischer, W8DBF
>>> ** For Assistance: dfischer at usol.com **
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Internal Virus Database is out-of-date.
>>> Checked by AVG.
>>> Version: 7.5.557 / Virus Database: 270.12.4/2081 - Release Date:
>>> 4/26/2009
>>> 9:44 AM
>>>
>>>
>>
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>> ** For Assistance: dfischer at usol.com **
>>
>>
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>> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
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>>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Internal Virus Database is out-of-date.
> Checked by AVG.
> Version: 7.5.557 / Virus Database: 270.12.4/2081 - Release Date: 4/26/2009
> 9:44 AM
>
>
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