A year ago today was, perhaps, the most bleak of my hospital stay.

I was later told that my children stopped by the hospital very early in the morning, on their way to my Dad's funeral. I have no memory of that. The sedation was so strong that I was only momentarily aware during the days. And often, that "awareness" was delusional. Man, I could tell you about some drug-induced dreams I had in that ICU!

We have kept the meticulous notes that Patty took of each day, and we've kept the sheets of paper on which I tried to communicate by writing throughout the days I was on a ventilator and couldn't speak. A year ago today my blood oxygen was at 92% only because the ventilator setting was at 100% oxygen (which, of course, cannot be maintained because of the damage that causes to the lungs). Because of the sedation, my sheet of scribblings is pretty much illegible. (Patty felt so bad that she couldn't understand what I was trying to communicate.) There are some partial words: "I can't breat." "Get a respppirret therrerpist." (It goes without saying that the respiratory therapists were not ignoring me!)

In retrospect, this was also an important day in my eventual recovery. According to Patty's notes, October 31 was the day when the infectious disease doctors determined that I did not have TB, and so the door to my room could be opened, and visitors and medical personnel no longer had to wear gown, gloves and mask. This was also the day when the docs thought of the possibility that a fungus could be causing the pneumonia. On that hunch, they started me on the IV anti-fungal drug, amphotericin B, and collected urine to be sent out to test for something called "histoplasmosis."