13

Jan

Hey Everybody! Happy Friday!!! Based on conversations that I've had recently It seems to me that some of you reading these posts are not necessarily sure about what constitutes a banger.  Well I'm going to try to clear that up for anyone who may not know..  First of all it still trips me out that you guys are out there reading what I write in these posts.  Again I have to ask why do you spend the most precious commodity that you have which is your time on reading about just what the Old Head

2017

11

Jan

Hey Everybody! It's 9:24 am and I am sitting in the Echo Lab waiting room at Toronto Western Hospital.  I had my biopsy done earlier this morning down on the 3rd floor in the Cath Lab.  Drs. McDonald and Mo presided.  They said everything looked good and my pressures were very good. Now I just have to wait for a couple of days to get my blood work and tissue results  back from the lab.  Mo and I talked about the upcoming Falcons game on Saturday.  He is a little nervous.  I am confident in the

2017

09

Jan

Hey Everybody! Welcome back!  I hope that you all had a good weekend and that your week has gotten off on the right foot.  It is 8:25 am and I am writing live from a chair in Home Hemo.  The blood from my line has been collected and now I'm waiting on someone from the lab to take blood cultures from my arm.   Now it's 9:23 am.  All the necessary blood has been taken for my blood work.  Elizabeth looked ahead and saw that I was scheduled to do my IV iron treatment for the month tomorrow but

2017

06

Jan

Hey Everybody! Happy Friday!!! I hope that you are all doing well  this afternoon.  Congratulations on making it to the first Friday of 2017!  It feels good doesn't it?  It's 12:56 pm and I have 2:03 to go on my dialysis run. Writing that post about Ethan reminded me that there was something that I had been meaning to get around to talking about for awhile but I just kept putting other things in front of it.  Well I am about to remedy that situation as I break down the individual parts of the

2017

05

Jan

Hey Everybody! I hope that you are all doing well this afternoon.  I am having a good day.  I have 1:01 left on my dialysis run.  I found a new way to spice things up this morning.  As I was prepping my access sites before I hooked  up to the machine I had to draw off a little blood from each line to clear out the locking solution that was left in the lines from my previous dialysis session.  The tego on my arterial line was really hard to draw through this morning and the simple solution was

2017

04

Jan

Hey Everybody! I hope that 2017 is going well for all of you so far.  We're only 2 days away from Friday!!!  I was thinking that I have managed to completely skip over a big little event that happened 12 days ago.  I hit 8 months post transplant!!!  At this point I'm still living rejection and infection free!!!  YAY!!!  The big day occurred on December 23rd or Christmas Eve Eve. LOL!  There was a lot going on at that time but I still took mental note of the occasion and now I'm making an actual

2017

03

Jan

Hey Everybody! That was a lot of fun for me!  I hope that you enjoyed reading this series of posts as much as I enjoyed writing them.  I have to give credit to my little brother Carl the one I like to pick on when I can.  A conversation that we had a few months ago was what put the idea for this series in my head.  My bother is an ordained deacon in his church.  As such he deals with funerals quite often.  While we were talking he told me that he planned to give the people he loved their

2017

02

Jan

Hey Everybody! Happy New Year!!! Welcome back to the blog!  I hope that you all had good holidays.  It is now 11:45 on Tuesday January 3, 2016.  This one took awhile but I had a lot to say.   It is 5:04 am on the last day of 2016.  I am coming to you live just like I said that I wouldn't.  Confession time.  I had my big plan to take a break for the holidays.  I have been writing almost every day.  Some of that writing has turned into this THT series and the rest will appear in future posts.

2017

31

Dec

Banger Nation!  I wish us all the safest and happiest of new years in 2017. Don't get too crazy tonight!  I want us all back here again on Monday!  Do I make myself clear? Be safe! Have Fun! KEEP BANGIN! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Good night and sleep well.  I'll be back next year.

2016

31

Dec

Hey Everybody! Today I want to talk about some of the good people who run my current hospital away from home at Grand River Hospital here in Kitchener.  I will introduce them in order of appearance and not in order of importance because everyone in this post has played an equal part in keeping me as healthy as possible and headed towards one goal.  That goal is a successful kidney transplant surgery as soon as that can be made possible.  Everyone was very welcoming to me when I arrived.  It's

2016

30

Dec

Hello, My name is Monica Pflug and I am Charles' partner. Charles asked me awhile ago if I would be interested in writing a guest post on his blog. I said, ‘What will I say? I’m not into blogging.’ And yet here I am writing. So here it goes…. Well, I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Charles’ blog starts off when he is in the CVICU for the 2nd time after his LVAD replacement. That was June 2015. And he had the 1st surgery in January 2015, so there is some missing time in there. I’m going to

2016

30

Dec

Happy Birthday Matt!  I love you! Paul Jesus Me and Matt  all celebrate our birthdays in less than a week of each other.  As Paul told me that's some rarefied company that we get to keep at this time of the year!  As I look back over the last 37 years which is the length of time that I have been afforded the privilege of calling Paul and Matt my two best friends. It makes me laugh to see through the perspective of hindsight that life placed those two young men in my path at the tender age of

2016

29

Dec

Hello I am Ryan Morrison, a 43 year old heart transplant recipient. Charles has asked me to provide a note for the KBM blog while he is enjoying Christmas. Thanks Charles for asking this is an interesting request as until this point Nicole (my wife of 15 years) and I have kept our story "off line". Note that “we”, “us”, “our”…is used as I did not got through this alone, Nicole has been at my side as head cheerleader of Team Morrison along with our family for this journey. Here is a much

2016

29

Dec

Hey Everybody! The LDAA meets on the second Wednesday of every month from 6:30 pm-8:30 pm.  Meetings are held in the training room behind the Heffner Toyota showroom at 3121 King Street E. Kitchener.  Everyone is invited to attend.  Only 2 more days left in 2016!  I hope that your holiday season is going well.  Today I want to talk about the group that took me in after I got my 2nd LVAD the LDAA.  LDAA stands for Life Donation Awareness Association.  For me our LDAA meetings represented a

2016

28

Dec

Hey Everybody! Ed was the first manager to be trained in our restaurant after I completed training myself there in the summer of 1996.  I don't know if any of y'all remember but in the summer of '96 Atlanta threw a party and we invited the whole world.  Guess what?  A lot of the invitations were accepted and Atlanta hosted the Summer Olympics that year.  It was nowhere near as crazy out in Snellville where Ed and I worked as it was downtown but we were busy enough.  Restaurant life brought our

2016

27

Dec

Hey Everybody! The changes in my relationship with Billy are how I can tell that I've turned into an adult. I met Billy a few days after I got back to Daytona after the Christmas break that I talked about in the previous post about Paul. When i went to the Registrar's office I found out that I was never in danger of being put on academic probation at all.  My previous grades were good enough that one bad semester did not tank my overall GPA.  I had allowed my mind to make things out to be far

2016

26

Dec

Hey Everybody! I'm back with the rest of the story. In the fall of 1992 I began attending classes at Florida International University in North Miami Beach FL.  I majored in Hotel/Restaurant Management.  FIU was the #2 hospitality school in the country but the #1 most affordable school for me so it won out over the competition.  Cornell was the best but it was all the way up in Ithaca NY and too expensive for a financially challenged young man like me to even think about attending.  Like almost

2016

26

Dec

Happy Birthday Me!!!   48 And Rolling Y'all!!! Hey Everybody! Happy Boxing Day or Happy Day After Christmas as we say back home! It Takes All Kinds! Here's a tale from the Old Head Banger's past life.   LOL! LOL! LOL! The main part of the story started almost 25 years ago and i have thought about it off and on ever since however i never realized until i read the title just now how much Chuckie C's sounds  like Chuck E. Cheese!  Stick with me and you'll see why that's so funny and why it

2016

24

Dec

Hey Everybody! It's because he's done stuff like this throughout all the years that we've known each other that I named my son after him.   Happy Birthday Paul!  I love you! In December of 1989 I was at one of the lowest points in my life.  I was attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach FL.  I was majoring in Computer Science with Aviation Applications in an attempt to make my mom and dad happy.  It turned out that all I succeeded at was managing to make myself

2016

23

Dec

Hey Everybody!   In the following series of posts designated with THT in the title I will introduce y'all to some of your fellow members in Banger Nation and the KBM.  Since the beginning of these posts I have naturally focused the blog on the happenings in and around Toronto General Hospital because that's where all the exciting action has taken place.  I feel that I have been somewhat remiss in giving props to some of my hometown heroes back in the ATL and here in K-W.  Well y'all I am about

2016

23

Dec

Hey Everybody! I have spent most of my adult life in a concerted effort to remain even keeled with my emotions.  I have attempted to not let the good times make me feel too high or let the bad times make me feel too low.  Along that line of thinking I do not give undue criticism to nor do I make it a habit of heaping undeserved praise upon the people in my life.  This young lady deserves more credit and praise than anyone else for keeping The Old Head Banger bangin.  So without further ado let

2016