Thank you for all the good words and patients.
I haven't been on the sites much and I know I am way behind on some of your orders. I assure you each and every one of you will be taken care of. I've talked with some of you on the phone this past two weeks. I'm not going to remember each and every conversation since I've probably had 70 or more different conversations, so if I've forgotten something or someone please bare with me. I can only work a few hours each day still. I am getting better but if I over do it I can damage something that may cause me to be paralyzed.
Just to let you know I'm still working on programs that were place last month. I'm working on them in the order they were received. Those that just ordered parts that didn't require any programming are done and shipped out. I will be updating the status on the website later today for those.
I'm also behind on my emails, PMs and some your questions on the forums, I will do my best to get those caught up also.
A lot of you have been asking what happened and why;
The surgery was needed to repair the damage from one of my falls while I was in the service. I had lost some of the feeling in my left arm and hand. Then right before I was medically retired from the service it had gotten worse going from sever pain to numbness constantly. Since they were processing me out already they basically turned me over to the VA for further medical treatment. I wasn't able to get this taken care of when I first got to FL because my employer wouldn't allow me any time off. He didn't think it was as serious as it really was and the fact that I was on pain killers constantly it masked what I was dealing with. Then after I quit working for that person I couldn't get anything done with it because I had no income and needed to get my business going. On top of that I had the custody battle for my kids going on. This required me to travel 2 or 3 times a week to SC and back. Keeping the business going and the custody battle were my top priorities. I was ignoring this part of my health situation and working out constantly in hopes that getting myself back in shape would fix the problem, which I was only kidding myself since this turned into a much more serious medical problem than I knew.
Then I broke my neck again about 10 months ago and so that caused this problem to accelerate, rapidly deteriorating my health. After the recovery from the broken neck I lost all feeling in my left hand due to the break from in the service, not the most recent break. I've now got some permanent nerve damage since the spinal column was pinched off by the broken bone that the Navy said was fine and not broken. Then the calcium from the break grew into my spinal column causing more damage. They had to cut that all away from the spinal column. That procedure alone was turned down by 3 other neuro surgeons because they thought it was too difficult and couldn’t be done.
As for why it happened all of a sudden taking most of you by surprise;
My surgery was pushed up by 2 and a half weeks so I was totally unprepared for this. They called me on a Monday and told me the surgery was moved up two weeks to that Friday. Then on Tuesday morning they called me and told me it was moved to that Thursday. Then that same Tuesday afternoon they called me again and told me it was again moved to Wednesday morning. I thought I had plenty of time when it was first changed to Friday to get my customers taken care of and all my orders completed after I got my EKG, blood tests and physical done in preparation for the surgery. I also had to set up someone to take care of Perry my daughter during my stay in the hospital. Then they required a Will and Living Will before the surgery so I had to get than done and notarized. The person that was to take care of my daughter fell through because of the shifts in the surgery dates. So my only choice was to get my mother to take off from work along with my dad and have them drive down here from OH.
They were planning on being here originally on Sunday when the hospital released me. So they had to drop everything to make it down here before the surgery.
My parents stayed for 2 weeks while I was bed ridden with the hallo attached to my skull. Recovery is supposed to be 6 to 8 weeks. During this I'm not to lift anything over 10 lbs and no driving or excursions. I didn't realize the extent of this surgery but when they have to remove a whole vertebra and cut away damaged portions of my spinal column, it's pretty serious. They expected about 4 hours on the table, it ended up well over 6 hours. So I'm now trying to do as much as I can without over doing it. I thought I could tough it out since that's pretty much ingrained into me, tough guy syndrome, ignore pain. But so far I've over done it a few times just sitting in front of the computer writing programs and then packaging up the chips, programmers and various other products. I end up with real bad headaches and nose bleeds because of the pressure build up in my spinal column and brain when the swelling occurs from excessive moving around.
And so that’s the pretty much covers what is going on. Again thanks to all of you for your support and patients with me.
