aka "Sometimes you have your agenda, but God's got his own plan. And where there's a difference, you follow His."
Got back home last night from the Upper Gauley rafting trip. Will post a separate thread with pics later. Was very fun, but with a good guide, not quite as scary as I thought it might be (although we could certainly see where it could easily go awry and kill you if you didn't pay attention).
The night after rafting, I got an intense burning pain in the middle of my stomach...after trying to tough it out for 4 hours, I finally woke my brother-in-law (who is a doctor) and told him I was about to pass out from the pain and that he needed to take me to a hospital. The hospital was luckily only 45 mins away, although it was the worst 45 min car ride I've ever taken. Got into the ER where they sedated me and gave me pain killers, which didn't work. Then two more injections in my arse finally calmed me down. Spent the next 2 days in the intensive care unit at Oak Hill, WV Hospital having suffered a bout of acute pancreatitis. Apparently, it can and does kill people. Anyway, they only let me go home because I was going with my BIL, the physician. Had more blood drawn today, and am looking to fully recover, but they still need to find out what caused this episode. I will say that the pain was the most severe I had ever felt in my life - there was no relief and I just wanted to be knocked unconscious.
Anyway, the downside was that I didn't get to join my buds on their mtb rides in the mountains, something I was looking more forward to than the rafting itself. The upside? My mtb is still clean.
Sometimes you can look forward to something too much. Interestingly, I wasn't very bummed that I wasn't able to ride...more like I was happy that I was alive.
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