Thinking Positive, a cancer and AIDS blog

Blogger Paul Serchia doesn't pull any punches about his diseases, but he's readable and often funny. He writes in this post about going to Kaiser in Hollywood to get his tracheotomy tube put back in.

The receptionist almost didn't recognize me without the familiar plastic apparatus around my neck, which she has been seeing on me for almost a year. But I held up the Zip-Loc bag with the disassembled pieces and handed the receptionist a note explaining what happened, which I wrote in the elevator ride to the sixth floor....

Dr. T read my note and then pumped up the chair so that we were eye-to-eye. He held a flashlight above the hole in my neck and peered inside.

"Bummer!" he said.

"What do you mean?" I wrote in my pad. Along with "Code Blue" and "I'll send for the chaplain," "Bummer!" is one of the last things you want your doctor to say when he inspects your breathing capacity.

After a minor urinary accident in his apartment, he quipped: "If any former classmates from Mrs. Kios' English class at Sierra Elementary School in Lancaster, Calif., are reading this: well, Paul hasn't changed much."


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