Stricture

Well it all started as I was minding my own business sitting at the helm peeling a hard boiled egg. I eat  a lot of eggs for the good protein source and once you get over the fluorescent red smudges from salmon egg cure that end up on them they're pretty darn tasty. Ya know Cool hand Luke ate 52 of them and never had a problem. Right then Sally Brooks rod goes off so I finish peeling and take a bite and swallow then take another bite and swallow. I'm kind of anxious but not really for the fish she has on after all I've seen that deal thousands of time....what I was anxious for was to get this pic of my old friend Sally fighting a fish with her pants down. Like always.

Sally and her husband Bill, (b.s. Brook) have fished with me since the 1980's and this is an every year event. She NEVER buttons the straps on her Helly's and invariably its a goat rope as she flounders around the boat with a fish on. But ya know if some people like to catch fish with their pants down, no worries, I'm with ya on that one.  But this turned out to be no ordinary salmon. Sally has caught a lot of big fish and she has this one about worn out when a 150 pound harbor seal comes up 40 feet from the boat with her fish in its mouth, rodman qwickfish lure and all....mmm.....well, the first thing we do is yell a little and then I realize this seal is in pretty shallow water with a gravel bar right behind it. So I run the boat directly at him and he has no escape and our friend Toby Archuleta has the presence of mind to beat on the boat loudly with the fish bonker and walla, the seal lets go and we win. Here's a pic of the first King salmon I've ever seen lose a fight to us and a seal all in the same day.

So the fish is in the box and we set up another troll and I have this heaviness in my throat. For 15 years now I sometimes have dense food seem to get stuck in my esophagus and it always goes away and sometimes I can even kind of swallow with effort to make that happen. Being just smart enough to hurt myself I looked in web MD years ago and diagnosed myself with a common hietal hernia which is a bulge that sometimes traps food.....well, that ain't what I got and this time it wasn't going away. I worked through it for an hour or so and when I realised that I couldn't even drink water it was time to do something. Its all I can do to not panic. The pain is so unusual that if I didn't know, or think I know what it was I'd be calling 911. But instead , Toby calls MP and asks her to be at the launch when we arrive and I pilot the boat home safely albeit a little light headed. MP says, enough of this, you're going to the hospital. She first calls our best friends adult kid Jessie Arthur who works for a good Doc and she says it sounds like you'll end up in an emergency deal anyway so you better just get there. So we do.

I've got a plastic card that's cost me thousands of dollars so we give it to the admittance people and that's a breeze. Having the card is a bit like being a Crown club member with Best Western. They ask me the problem and some how or another it was wrote down as a sore throat so we waited and wait as they had other priority's. Well the doc finally arrives and wouldn't ya know its a guy I know who is also a  fishing guide. The first thing he asks is how was the bite today.....hey Bob, I'm semi dieing here OK....he can't really believe my level of discomfort so he asks me to try and drink some Mountain Dew soda. I tell him I can't and he says try anyway. So, I take a big swallow and the world just about ends, I go into convulsions as some is in the airway and my body and throat are locked up. Bob goes to running. In two minutes (after I'm done convulsing) I have an I.V. needle in me and am being given muscle relaxants. I'm on my way to my first ever bona fide surgical procedure.

The doctors agree its a 'stricture' a tightening of tissue that will not allow the passage of food. Within 1/2 hour they wheel me into the operating room and as I'm trying to spit and am  choking when they lay me down I get the mask immediately and the next thing I remember was waking up with a nurse friend, Gena Pollard giving me a hug. Well that's the cool thing about a small town, we know lots of people and all the support and love I've gotten was ultra cool.  Thanks Slooooowdotna. So here's a pic of what my new friend surgeon David King saw when he looked down my throat. I know it looks a hell of a lot like I didn't chew that egg but trust me, the eggs turns to a kind of mush when eaten add then settles in the roundness of my stricture....although many hospital people told me to peel them next time. The doc said it was a time bomb, if not the egg something else would have done it. The first pic is before, the 2nd after.

I get home about 6 pm with an anesthesia fog and go to bed....I gotta go fishing in the morning. But, just my luck that its common for post anesthesia to create a fever and I have a terrible one all night so I toss and turn, shiver and freeze then sweat all night long. MP cools me off with wet towels and tells me the fever is not too bad ( later she confessed that I was burning up and didn't want to scare me...and I needed to go to work of course). But 4 am arrives and if nothing else, I've always been tough and my friend Jake Marguis from  Mexico by way of Wasilla is here with some new friends. It was a bit difficult for me but Jake and his buddy Doobie are go to guys and they do most of the work. I usually don't like to publish just plain old dead fish pics as anybody and everybody does but in this case I have to, we were firing on only 3 cylinders and still had a great day. Here's Jake with the biggest King of his life and Doob's wife Vicki with a 54 pounder that was by far the hottest and hardest to catch, meanest and nastiest King salmon of the year.

So if you want to know what the future holds, hell....I wanna know what the future holds, here's the deal. Right now my throat is in shock and from convulsing my ab muscles are so sore I can hardly sit up. I'm on a liquid diet because the last thing we need is an encore performance of that deal.  Soon I hope to eat soft food and soft food only until it is surgically repaired which will happen within a few weeks. The surgery will clean up scar tissue (you can even see some in the pic) and relax that area. Its been building for years although it is something that you are born to. So here's the lecture part....guys that put up with things instead of going to have them looked at are like parked on the railway tracks waiting for a train....it'll come, just when is the question. So surgery in a few weeks, in the meantime I think I'll go fishing.