Well, it happened again. I got to spend a few days in the hospital. I’ve been thinking of writing a travelog about all the different hospitals I’ve spent the night (or month) in. The list is growing longer. This time, it was Williamson County Medical Center, in Franklin, TN. Why there? Perhaps this is where I should begin at the beginning. Normally, I have a small problem with fluid retention, not uncommon among heart patients. However, in the past couple months, fluid retention has gotten worse, and not controllable by just adding more of the diuretic that I usually take. In other words, even with compression socks, my legs were so swollen, my calves barely fit into the legs of my jeans, and my feet were so swollen that they would barely fit into my shoes. In addition, my difficulty with breathing was worse, so I would be out of breath just walking a short distance. Exasperated, my cardiologist / heart failure doctor asked me to go to my primary care physician. She was out of town, so I saw her PA. Nothing unusual showed up, but there had to be a reason in there somewhere. The PA wanted to see some numbers. They would normally just draw the blood at the office, but the in-house phlebotomist was out that day. She asked if we would be willing to go to Williamson County Medical Center and let them do the lab work. No problem, that is where my cardiologist is located. The PA said to go to the ER and she would call ahead and get them up to speed before we got there. My little red light was beginning to flash in my head.. “Danger Will Robinson” drifted into my head and rattled around as Sandy and I drove to the hospital, about 20 minutes away.
Admitted
We arrived at the hospital, and after a little confusion as to where the ER was located, we found it and went inside. It was a very quiet ER. Good! They quickly whisked us away and into a room. It didn’t take much time for them to tell us that they wanted to admit me to the hospital. They were concerned that I had a blood clot in my leg. Shortly after getting settled in the hospital room, a guy arrived with a wheelchair and I was on my way to radiology for an ultrasound of both legs. Well, for me, that was a piece of cake. I had nothing to do except lie still while he was taking the pictures. It wasn’t long after I got back to my room, that another guy with a wheelchair arrived and took me back to radiology for an echocardiogram. The verdict of the leg ultrasound was that there are no blood clots in my legs. The echocardiogram showed everything working as it should, but my ejection fraction had dropped from 50 to 35-40 in the course of about 3 months. Not a good thing.
Heart Cath
Okay, with the clues they had, the decision was made to do a double heart catheterization. It was too late in the day to schedule it, so I was on the list for the next day. But not on the schedule. Next morning, another guy showed up, this time no wheelchair, so I was off to the cath lab in the bed. I had that one figured out. They needed the bed for the return trip, when my right leg had to be kept straight and level for about 4 hours after the procedure was over. The doctor was trained by Dr. Fleet, my cardiologist for almost 20 years, who had just retired. Good, I trust him then. Once again, my job is simply to lie there and be very still. No problem. I don’t know how long it took, but we chatted a little as he went along, and that made the time pass a little faster. Back to the room via bed express, and then I could order breakfast! Later on, after lunch, my brother Bill came up from Huntsville, AL for a visit. Conveniently, the hospital is about an hour closer to Huntsville than our house. That gave us the opportunity to have a nice long visit.
Oh Yeah, The Song
Lemmee see, this was a story about a song, wasn’t it? So, here we go. Like at home, I don’t sleep well at night. I did catch a couple hours, but woke up around 3:30 AM, and that was that. All of a sudden, I got an idea for a song, and I wanted to write it down so I didn’t forget it. i grabbed my iPhone off its charger, opened up a text file with Pages editor, and started writing. I intended to just sketch out a basic outline for the song, and write a little bit of the lyrics, more as a placeholder than anything really useable. As I went along in the dark, I noticed that I was putting in way more detail than just an outline. I was writing song lyrics in the middle of the night in the hospital! I didn’t think what I was writing would hold up, but Ken and I operate on the “scrambled eggs” principle, which is how Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday. He had the melody in his head, but not the lyrics, so he filled the space with something silly, “Scrambled eggs, ooh ooh baby how I love your legs” later became “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away”. So I wrote down what came to mind at 3 in the morning, without worrying about what the words were. I knew there would be a lot of work ahead to get it right. Eventually, I had something written for everything except the bridge, so I just wrote “Put bridge here” or something like that, and then moved on. Done! The lyrics were a mess. Some lines were 15 syllables long, while others were 4. Some lines rhymed, some didn’t. Not to worry, I can fix it at home. When I got home 2 days later, I decided to put the lyrics in just as they were, so I just copied and pasted the lyrics into Suno AI. Then I specified the instruments and the way the song would be structured, and hit the Create button. I didn’t expect it to sound good, or even descent. But what I heard was instead, not bad. No, it was good. Needed a little nip and tuck here and there, both musically and lyrically. I edited the lyrics once. Just once and all those words that I thought didn’t really fit together, did exactly that. The long lines and short lines, unrhyming lines, all that stuff, just worked. At that point I had a couple of candidates that just differed musically, and I sent them to Ken and asked his opinion, and he picked the same one I did. Then I changed it and added a couple of instruments, and the sound was so much better! It didn’t take long to settle on 2 versions, and then to pick the winner. When I say that this song wrote itself, I’m not kidding. Okay, I am kidding myself when I say that. God wrote this song! And He just used me as his hands to type in the words and the AI prompt. Thank you Lord for this gift from God!
What To Do?
Originally, I intended to hold this song back, and have Ken give it to Sandy as a final gift from me, on the assumption that my medical issues will put me in the ground before Sandy . But the internal pressure was just too much, and I gave it to Sandy one morning. I’ll just say this, she likes it! So, if you haven’t already listened to Trinity, here it is again. Give it a try.
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