Sadly, Moh Moh, my daughter, couldn’t get a DN from the State Department. DNs are similar to DVs, which are Diversity Visas. The DN means Diversity Nursing. I told Ti Ti to find out whether her mother could get a DN and fly to Crown Point in less than a week. I know it was pushing Moh Moh to complete all the application paperwork, be granted a DN, and acquire a flight to Chicago by yesterday. However, it was beyond the pale.

I needed Moh Moh to care for me for several months. What was the reason that I needed her as my nurse? Yesterday, I went to my ENT doctor at St. Mary’s Hospital in Hobart, IN. In 2008, a doctor saved my life at that hospital. I fell off a ladder and hit my head on a retaining wall. As a result, I had a subdural hematoma, which means bleeding in the brain. It was one of my two dances with death.

However, I got a common cold in January and wrote about it in I Had a Bad Cold Last Month. I have had loads of colds on my eight-decade journey down the yellow brick road of life. They come one day and are gone the next.

Nonetheless, I’ll never forget this one. It resulted in my getting fluid in my middle ear. One of my Eustachian tubes got clogged up, which meant that the fluid in my middle ear couldn’t drain. Therefore, my ENT operated in his office and drained some of the fluid from my middle ear. However, he wanted to complete the drainage issue in the hospital surgery department a week later.

My insurance company had a driver pick me up and drive me to St. Mary’s. Once I arrived, I registered and was taken to the pre-op area. The nurse attached an IV to my hand, and the anesthetist stopped by to explain how they would administer the general anesthetic to me. A couple of minutes later, I was in la la land, which is a medical term for being unconscious. I have had a handful of surgeries over the years. It is fascinating how quickly one goes from conscious to unconscious...as in a nanosecond.

I was out like a light. However, this time was different. I didn’t feel any pain, and what I saw was all in black and white. Also, I seemed to be floating above the operation, even though I saw myself on the operating table. After getting back home, I jotted down what I remembered of being under the knife. Unfortunately, large parts of the surgery were forgotten.

My ENT and I were raised above the operating room to the roof of the hospital to begin the very lengthy procedure of removing the fluid in my inner ear. As I recall, it was less than 5 minutes.

This is about all of the actual surgery that I can recall.

It took less than an hour to return to the real world. And I left the hospital without any fluid in my ear.