A hug to you.  I wish your wife a steady and uneventful recovery.  I wish for you a time of calm and serenity.

Suzi

baddhabbitt you and your wife deserve a very big HUG for what you both went through, so I'm sending one from me.

Samson.

what an amazing story, u and your wife are true heroes, here is a huge hug

My thoughts this morning went to the blood transfusions that my wife had to have, that was very important in fighting the pneumonia that had set in because of the need of the respirator and her blood being so contaminated with bacteria that it alone could not battle all infection within her system.

My wife and I have not ever been able to donate blood because she has hepatitis C within her blood that she developed a year or so before I met her when she was giving birth to her first child, the child died a day after being born.  That infection came into her system through a blood transfusion.

The reason I can't donate is because I had TB when I was 4 yrs old through exposure to a relative that was not just a carrier but a spreader too.  These are permanent fixtures in our life.

Thank all that is good and wondrous that it was these events in the medical histories that forced changes of microscopic screening to prevent the spread of these and other diseases.

Now to my thoughts of this morn.  My wife and I in deed served our country many years ago.  But my tugs of heart and mind go out to those people who have served and do serve their country through what most consider a simple act in the donating blood.

To me this procedure is not so simple.

In the last few years I have finally began to come to grips with my own PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) which normally when most hear of it they consider the veterans that have gone through trauma of some type while serving their country.

I have a deep, uncontrollable fear of needles.  The reason?  In the 1950's the tuberculosis epidemic was so dangerous that the government made it law that those infected would be put into sanitariums to be treated (the real truth is experimented on).

I, my friends, am one of those that was torn from their family at the age of 4 yrs old.  Daily shots with needles that to me seemed a foot long, and almost daily forced to swallow tubes (they were made of rubber then and did not taste as good as today's plastic ones).  It got to the point that because of the fear I would organize the other children of the ward to help push all beds into a corner of the room and we all would crawl way in to the back to escape our tormentors.  I learned to manipulate elevators to the point of hanging up between floors so that it would delay them, all the while giggling in the corner of that little six by six box.  (I think that is one reason that during my POW school training many years later I was able to simply go to sleep when our "captures" put us in 4 by 4 boxes and such.)

Dang John, get to the point will ya?

Hugs to all you that willingly give your blood for others.

Oh!, by the way?  Those experiments worked, after six months in that santitarium in St. Paul, MN I was sent home, now just a carrier that would always have a  TB Tine test of positive, and not a spreader which would have meant I would not be here today to say "HUGS TO ALL YOU GIVERS"