''Brain Tumor - Go Home and Put Your House in Order''

BRAIN TUMOR – GO HOME AND PUT YOUR LIFE IN ORDER!

It was really quite the lovely life here in the beautiful Florida Keys, in 1985.  We were still healthy, and still very much in love, after 26 years of marriage.

Mel had one of the highest Civil Service jobs, as the Superintendent of Public Works Department, at Boca Chica Naval Air Station, Key West.  Mel had designed and built, sub-contracting out some jobs he couldn’t do, our magnificent stilt-type Key’s home, on Sugarloaf Key, on nights and weekends.

We had “credit-carded” ourselves to the hilt over the 26 years, but finally cut up all those cards and consolidated all the bills into one low interest loan, through our Metropolitan Life Insurance policy.

Our three K’s were all out on their own, and we were managing the $1000 a month mortgage payment, high Key’s utilities, a movie every week, and a 17 foot boat, to do a little fishing!

After our second K. had a cyst removed from her tailbone, I brought her home from the hospital to recuperate here, in July of 1985.  After getting her settled in her old room, I went for my daily walk and “litter detail”, around 3:30 p.m.  When I returned home, the phone rang, and it was Mel’s boss, CDR Charlie Fehlig!  He was sorry to tell me, but Mel had suffered “some kind of “seizure”, and had been taken to the same hospital that Kim had just left that same day!

The doctor on duty that late afternoon in the emergency room, told me Mel had a Grand Mal seizure!  At first they thought it had been a stroke, then they thought it was a heart attack, but after tests, decided on the Grand Mal.  They admitted him, and the seizure had been so violent, it had broken and strained bones in his back.  He was sore all over his body.

Dr. Carraway, the heart specialist assigned to his case, said a CAT scan had shown “something” on his brain, and since there were no neurologists or neurosurgeons in the whole Keys, that we make an appointment as soon as possible with one in Miami!

I love to read.  When I read a well-written book, I can escape for a while and live in their world!

I adore books written by those unbelievably courageous Holocaust victims and survivors, also true experiences by Doctors and Nurses, and because I’m a very nosey person by nature, autobiographies of famous and not so famous people.