Well Friday night,“the night from hell”, ended and transitioned into Saturday morning, the day I hoped to be checking out of this facility!
As the Sun started coming up over the horizon, the room activity increased with every minute. First up on the agenda was take my blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and of course whip those sheets back and check out the ol groin and pubic region for a bruising check! Everything must have delighted the new morning nurse, ’cause she too busted out into some tee-hee-hee’s and giggles! I didn’t know that looking a bruise could be so humorous.
Once the new nurse gathered up her composure, she left my room and returned with breakfast. I had forgotten just how unappealing hospital food could be until my tray was presented to me for my edification. I will attempt to adequately describe the culinary delight to the best of my ability.
First off, the centerpiece of this breakfast was a heaping mound of egg-like material. It appeared that the eggs were just barely cooked enough to coagulate into this mound. Now my family will attest that I don’t eat eggs unless they are cooked for a while, like well done…PERIOD! Looking at this yellowish globular mound almost turned my stomach! The sidekicks to the eggs was a bowl of cream of rice, which was very tasty, toast, orange juice, and two sausage links that were the consistency of glue when eaten. Those two little dudes stuck to the enamel of my teeth, and hugged the base of my tongue like criminals avoiding a police manhunt! Yummy was not the words that came to my mind after attempting to eat my breakfast!
The next few hours were spent awaiting the doctor’s arrival for a last minute check over and a release to go home. That waiting period took until approximately 1:30pm. At that time my surgeon, the Electro-physiologist, strolled into my totally apologetic about not getting to my room much earlier in the morning. He said that he was filling in for 53 doctors in Fresno that day!
Once he gave me the “once over”, he signed the release orders. Now all that was left was to get to get the IV needle out of my left forearm, go over all the releasing documents, and oh yeah removing that pesky little catheter that is still up into my bladder! I can only imagine how thrilling this procedure is going to be for me!! Yippe yo ki yeah get along little doggy!!
Now my nurse was a very nice young women, about the age of my two sons. I am thinking to myself, this is not going to be a huge ball of fun. More importantly, I am not sure what the procedure for my catheter removal is going to include, but I am reasonably sure it involves “hands on” maneuvers here!!
Now I must digress. Just as a side note here, the only women that have ever touched me where this nurse was about to grab on to, drunk or sober, were women with which I have had an intimate relationship. However my friends, I have now entered into an area whereby I have become totally unnerved and completely uncomfortable! Can someone please help me!
Now that the time has come for that catheter to be removed, I am very nervous and extremely uncomfortable. I ask her a couple of questions and I am feeling like it is time to “fish or cut the bait.” So she soothes my anxiety with some small talk, she says to take a big breath in and then exhale, she will remove the catheter on the exhalation. So I follow her instructions and out comes the catheter with a burning sensation! Yoweee!
Following the catheter removal, my nurse departs my room and gives me some “privacy” to get dressed. I am thinking that this is a very odd situation. She just was in a position to not only see all of me, but to grab a “handful”, in my case that Saturday morning a very little handful, and remove the catheter. Now she gives me some privacy to get dressed. I am thinking that there has to be some irony in that scene!!
I get dressed and the hop into my classic, low tech, hallway cruiser and transporter. Some of you may know it by its name in the previous century, the wheelchair. Down the halls, into the elevator and out the front door to my waiting transportation to my sister’s house for some badly need sleep and recuperation!
I am checking out and heading out of here!
As the Sun sets in the west, I am taking off to new destinations. Happy trails to you, until we meet again!
In Part 3, I left you with this thought; “You can NEVER rest in the hospital.”
Let me explore and expound upon this thought.
From the moment that I arrived back into my room, there were nurses coming and going about every 20 minutes, They would come in and take my temperature, take my pulse, check my left groin, monitor the bruising that occurred there, check my catheter, and dump the fluid out of it as needed.
Now most of those activities are ok. However, when the nurses check your catheter tube and its connections, that is somewhat degrading. More emphatically, when they pull down the sheets and check the bruising that is in you left groin and pubic region, embarrassment doesn’t really cover the feeling very well. Moreover, when the nurse is trying very hard not “to bust a gut” and break out laughing, demoralized comes close to how you feel! I know it is only the hospital, it shouldn’t bother you. Oh yeah, right I forgot!
Anyway, I digress. After four hours in surgery and three hours in the recovery room, I get to my room and all I want to do is grab some much needed sleep. My family leaves my room about 9 pm, I am thinking that now I can get some rest and sleep this long day off. I am not prescribed any pain medication everything in my mind tells me that with the door closed I can really get some good sleep!
Oh contrare my friend!
From 9 pm Friday night until 1:20 am Saturday morning the nurses were in my room every 20 minutes taking my blood pressure, temperature, and checking right left groin and pubic region, keeping a close watch on the spreading bruise that I have there! From 1:20 am until 3 am I was able to sleep uninterrupted, one whole hour and forty minutes!
The calm and quietness of my room ended at 3 am when the phlebotomist comes into my room, flips on the light switch, and announces that she has to draw some blood. At 3 am they have to draw some of my blood, you really got to be sh#%!ing me? “Why 3 am, couldn’t this wait for a more civilized time, like say 7 or 8 am”, I inquired? “No doctor’s orders,” was the response! Dude!!! So out comes the foot long needle and she drew out, what seemed to be, a gallon of my beloved blood!
Now that this ordeal is over, surely I can sleep the rest of the morning? Yeah right! As the “Dracula Nurse” was leaving, in came the morning nurse to take my blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and she pulls back the covers to get a better look at the old groin and pubic area to check the status of my bruising again. Dude !!
It is now about 3:30 am and this old boy is getting very tired of my hospital care! I hoping that this is the last interruption so that I can at least get a couple of hours sleep before the sun rises. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, I was oh so wrong! At 5 am the nurse once again enters the room and turns on the high intensity lights for another round of……..blood pressure, pulse, temperature, additionally she gave me a pneumonia shot, and of course checking out my groin and pubic region for bruising!!
I was starting to feel paranoid. I think that the word was out and all the nursing staff had to cop a view!! For sure I knew something was up when the nurses started bringing a magnifying glass with them when they entered my room! Dude!!
Well so much for sleeping at night in the hospital. There was nonstop interruptions throughout the night in my room! The high intensity lights in my room felt like searchlights each and every time the light switch was turned on!
It was truly the “Night From Hell”!
Stay tuned for checking out and going to my sister’s house in Part 5.
It was with Lynard Skynard’s “Free Bird” and this last thought that I ended the last article, Part 2:
The last thing that I remember were these words from the stereo system:
If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling on, now
‘Cause there’s too many places
I’ve got to see……….
Off to Happy Valley, USA I went……………………
“Mr. Hammack, wake up, wake up, the surgery is over!”
As rum-dumb and as groggy from all the anesthesia as I was, that was even better music to me ears than Lynard Skynard was to me some 4 1/2 hours previously! The unknown was over. None of the possible “side affects” seemed to have happened to me! I can hear, I think that I can somehow slur an answer out. So maybe no heart attack, looks like no stroke happened, and I am definitely alive! YIPPEE!
As they rolled me out of that daunting surgery room, one of the surgical nurses told me that we will be rolling by my family and that they would stop briefly so I could say “hi” to them. Yeah, right, like I could be coherent after being under the influence of “the good stuff” for more than 4 hours! However, I do remember stopping briefly at the waiting room, seeing adults that closely resembled my family, muttering brilliant verbiage that probably was totally undecipherable, but nevertheless undeniably brilliant!
Once in the recovery room, I could tell that there was some concern over my lack of recovery. The recovery room nurse was hovering over my left leg, applying pressure to my groin area, and expressing concern that the bleeding will not stop there! He was also making calls to the surgery room or the cardiac floor for assistance. It was slow in coming, in fact I was in the recovery room for over three hours. The normal recovery time is about an hour.
Needless to say, the stress that my family and friends were feeling was tremendous. There were starting to be some frayed nerves precipitated from the lack of communication between the recovery room and the family waiting room. Among my family and friends, there was this overwhelming felling that something was something definitely wrong, because I was so long in the recovery room.
On the other hand, I was horizontal in recovery kind of stuck in a holding pattern, like was arriving at JFK, ATL, SFO, or ORD (Chicago)! And on top of it all, I didn’t really didn’t give a dang! After all, I was still rocking in my head to some goooood Lynard Skynard that led me down the path to Happy Valley, USA! Surely nothing could be going wrong. Nevertheless, there was concern in the recovery room over my left groin bleeding.
After more than three hours in the recovery room, the nurses were able to get the bleeding in my left groin stopped, and with that accomplished I got to go to my hospital room. Now the time is about 8pm Friday evening, 12 hours after I first signed into the hospital! To say that this has turned into a very long day is a gross understatement to say the least!
As my family and friends assembled one at a time into my room there was noticed a collective sigh of relief that this procedure was now over for them, as well. They could see for themselves that I had made it through a very long, arduous, and intricate surgery, in turn making their Friday a very long and anxious ordeal!
From my standpoint, it was a welcomed relief to be back in my hospital room, seeing my family and friends, knowing that all of worst was behind me. However, for those of you who have stays in the hospital for any length of time, arriving back in your room is only the beginning of what is in store for the patient! You can NEVER rest in the hospital.
Stay tuned for the “Friday night from Hell”, and Part 4!
When I last left you at the end of “My Date With The Electro-Physiologist, Part 1″, I had thrown out the idea that I was having a “helmet fire” as they were rolling me out of my cubicle and down the L-O-N-G hallway to the elevator.
For those of you who are have a difficult time comprehending the concept of having a “helmet fire”, I will try to help you understand that concept of feeling. A “helmet fire” has no conscience or internal clock, it can happen at any time, at any place! But my “helmet fire” was occurring on the gurney, on the L-O-N-G hallway to the elevators. It was happening as I was leaving my family and friends for, what I perceived, could be the very last time! The fear of the unknown that lay ahead of me at the end of the gurney ride, the thought that something could happen during the four hour procedure of probing my heart, a heart attack, a stroke, and the worse side effect of this procedure……death, was causing my emotions and my intellectual thoughts to call each other out and begin an “old fashioned, blue collar, bar fight” inside my head! It was totally out of control! That my friends, is just one example of what a “helmet fire” might be or feel like inside your brain!
However, by the time I had gotten into the surgery room, the “helmet fire police” had arrived inside my heard and arrested all those involved in the “helmet fire” and carted them off in the “paddywagon”! But now the fear of the unknown had taken over and things got real serious. The surgery nurses, both men, had arrived in the room. Their first point of business was to gather up all the patches, probes, and the electrical connectors that was going to be used in this highly computerized and electrical exploration expedition into the sanctuary I call my heart.
It took them more than 30 minutes to put the required patches on my chest and back in the appropriate places, place the probes in the designated areas fore and aft, and then attach all the wires that would provide the vital information to the many computer screens that were above the surgery table. During this “hook up” process the nurses obviously noticed that I was shaking in my boots, even though the only thing that I had on was that “designer gown” I described in Part 1.
One of them asked me what kind of music that I like. I replied that my music runs the gamut from Alabama, ZZ Top, Merle Haggard, The Beatles, The Eagles, Lynard Skynard, Brad Paisley, and many points in between! “My music tastes might be called eclectic”, I added! He replied that I would most likely enjoy what he was cranking up. Well he was right, over the speakers came a little southern rock band from Jacksonville, FL that you all may have heard over the years…….Lynard Skynard singing “Sweet Home Alabama” followed up by “What’s Your Name, Little Girl”!
As this long, painstaking pre-surgery procedure was culminating and the team was ready to rock and roll, my doctor strolled in and greeted me with this phrase, “Good morning Captain how are you doing? We are ready, how about you? ” I replied, obviously in a apprehensive sort of way, that I was indeed ready to get this over. The anaesthetist had taken up his position next to my right arm, briefed me on what to expect, and set a mask on my face with the consoling words that this will start to relax you now, Captain. He was right I could feel the soothing affects of the anesthesia, along with Lynard Skynard’s tune “Free Byrd” I was fading.
The last thing that I remember were these words from the stereo system:
If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling on, now
‘Cause there’s too many places
I’ve got to see
July 9th, that was the day, and for many reasons a day that I will never forget!
What started out to be a typical summer Friday turned into anything but that. I was told to report to the second floor, outpatient surgery, at 8am for pre-op and processing.
I make sure that I am at the hospital with about 15 minutes to spare so that I can find my designated place to register. I got through the registration process reasonably quickly. However, there were a few things that I found quite puzzling. When I first get to the registration window and tell them who I am, they gave me a slip of paper. I look down at this piece of paper and I notice that I have been designated and relegated to known a patient N. That is a little unnerving to know that I have been reduced to just one letter, “N”, until I finish registering. So there you have it, I am now patient “N”!
Really is there that much concern that my privacy would be compromised or stolen at a hospital? After all, in just a few hours I am going to “Butt Naked and Spread Eagle” up on surgery table for the whole world to see!! Additionally, I am going to have TV cameras, work tools, and wires threaded up and into places that have never been open to any one or anything! Having myself “Butt Naked”up on the surgery table is the kind of privacy I am really much more concerned about, rather than exposing my identity to others around me! To me that was an exercise in nonsense.
Anyway, off I go now into my little cubicle for the finer part of this pre-op adventure. To start with, I am instructed to get out of clothing and slip into that fine hospital floral patterned, backless, knee length, and I might add, with ties and snaps, designer gown! Man did I look great in this hospital contraption!
Next in this process is the part where you get the IV inserted into your arm for the impending surgical process. Sometimes it can feel like she/he is inserting a telephone pole into your veins. However my “needle girl” was obviously skilled at searching out and inserting that seemingly footlong IV into my left forearm. It was almost pain free!
It is approximately 8:45 am and now all the pre-op items have been accomplished! It appears that I only now I only have about 1:15 to wait for the procedure to actually start. Which, in my head, I am thinking that in about 30-45 minutes they will be rolling me out of this location and heading me towards my destiny meeting with the Electro-physiologist, the surgery room, and the medical technicians that will be assisting him in this 4 hour, inter-artery invasion into my beloved heart.
Now the clock is ticking. I am keeping a very close watch on the clock that I can barely see at the nurse’s station through the skinny slit in the curtain dividers. Ten o’clock comes and goes, no gurney coming for me. Odd, I am thinking, the procedure was scheduled to begin promptly at 10 am! Oh well they will be rolling into my small confines shortly, so I just hang out with the family.
It was 11:15 am before the bell rung for me! It wasn’t a sense of panic that I felt, but there was some sembelence of “this could be more serious than I originally thought” running through my brain. The NASCAR boys might equate this thought to, “he’s having a helmet fire” right now!!
I wondered out this morning in Washington D.C. for a bit of lunch. I knew exactly where I was heading, Chipotle! Yes siree, give me that Barbacoa Burrito. I couldn’t wait for that scrumptious combination to go” down the hatch”! Boy oh boy, it sure was delicious.
Now the plan, on the walk back to the hotel, was to stop at the Rite Aid store for a “big” bottle of Diet Coke. So I stroll into the store scouring the isles for their beverage area. Eureka, I found it! So I scooped up the jug of liquid gold and headed to the cash register. Here it is Sunday morning about 11:45 am, the streets a teeming with locals out for their morning walk. The area is bustling.
But unfortunately, there is only 1 person working the cash register. Can you believe that, just one cashier! The line is about 10 people deep waiting to check out. So I patiently waited in line for my time. I put my diet coke up on the counter and proceed to pay for it. I was given my change and the receipt. Meanwhile,I was waiting for the checker to put my purchase in a plastic bag so that I could carry my highly prized diet coke back to my hotel room. The cashier motioned to the next customer to put his purchase up on the counter. I then asked the cashier if he could put my “lifeline” in a plastic bag, please.
I felt that it was not an outlandish request. This is the reply that I heard. “That will befive cents please”! I said “excuse me”! He reiterated that will be a five cent charge. Before I could even formulate an intelligent response I heard this spew out of my mouth,”you gotta be sh***ing me“! He looked somewhat aghast to that reply. Again that phrase flew out of my lips, “really you gotta be sh***ing me”! He then looked like he had been hit by a ton of it! I grabbed my diet coke and very quickly departed the store before my lips got me into further trouble with the cashier.
Nonetheless, I find that practice to be totally unacceptable! The store sell products that the customer needs, makes a sizable profit on those products, and now has the audacity to charge for bags to carry your purchases out of the store! REDICULOUS !
CUSTOMERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
That will be 5 cents is BIG BS! What do you think?
Growing in the Baptist Church, I would always here that phrase: ” I will pray for you”. Well, it was always meant in a very good and positive manner!
But what happens when someone, your formerly significant other, has done you wrong and you feel like you have taken the biggest SCREWING in your life?
How do you as a person deal with it positively? Well fret no more gang, I just heard a song that sums it all up very positively! It is by Jaron and The Long Road to Love. It is just started played on country stations, you should really check it out! The video is after the lyrics.
To all those who have put the screws to me, I am going to church on Sunday and …..I Will Pray For You!! LOL!
Here are the lyrics!
I haven’t been to church since I don’t remember when
Things were goin’ great ‘til they fell apart again
So I listened to the preacher as he told me what to do
He said you can’t go hatin’ others who have done wrong to you
Sometimes we get angry, but we must not condemn
Let the good Lord do His job and you just pray for them
I pray your brakes go out runnin’ down a hill
I pray a flowerpot falls from a window sill and knocks you in the head like I’d like to
I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
I pray you’re flyin’ high when your engine stalls
I pray all your dreams never come true
Just know wherever you are honey, I pray for you
I’m really glad I found my way to church
‘Cause I’m already feelin’ better and I thank God for the words
Yeah I’m goin’to take the high road
And do what the preacher told me to do
You keep messin’ up and I’ll keep prayin’ for you
I pray your tire blows out at 110
I pray you pass out drunk with your best friend and wake up with his and her tattoos
I pray your brakes go out runnin’ down a hill
I pray a flowerpot falls from a window sill and knocks you in the head like I’d like to
I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
I pray you’re flyin’ high when your engine stalls
I pray all your dreams never come true
Just know wherever you are, near or far, in your house or in your car,
wherever you are honey, I pray for you.
I have a Blackberry with at&t mobile service. I have been a longtime at&t mobile customer, and I have been relatively happy with their product, until recently.
About two years ago I decided to get myself a Blackberry phone. It would allow me to access many things that I needed, while away from my home flying to all point of the USA. For the first year my Blackberry worked fine. Then I inadvertently tried to teach my phone how to swim in the toilet!! (That in itself is another good story.) I found out very quickly that a Blackberry can not do the backstroke, the breaststroke, the butterfly, nor the freestyle!
The replacement that I had to purchase, I inadvertently forgot to purchase insurance on the first phone, lasted a few months before it developed technical problems. The second replacement lasted about 6 months before it developed technical as well as aesthetic physical issues.
I now have a third replacement Blackberry, now a total of 4 phones later, that is only 33 days old. It, too, is now not functioning at 100% capacity. It is very slow and it appears that the battery doesn’t last as long as it should. When switching between applications, it goes into its “thinking” mode! C’mon, dude, don’t start that “thinking” crap with me all the time!!
Well, I have talked to the at&t mobile store and they were not going to “work a deal” with me. I spoke to them about working a deal to change phones to an Apple iPhone. They say that Apple has “their hands tied” contractually. Well I said that if you show me what that knot looks like, I am sure that I can untie it and then we can play “Let’s Make A Deal”!! The lady saw no humor in that part of our conversation, GRRRR. She informed me that my account was not available for an upgrade until 9/6/2010, that’s five months away. But if I wanted to pay full price-$499 for the iPhone- she would be more than happy to help me out. I believe what she meant to say was that if I was that stupid and willing to pay double price for the iPhone before my contract was up, she would be MORE than happy to take my money and help me out, you idiot!
YGBSM!! (You gotta be S####ing me!) I believe that was was my reply to this young lady on the other end of the phone acting as a ‘customer service’ person. There was a long pause and then she so eloquently replied…….”I take that answer to be NO, Mr. Hammack????” I told her that I thought that she was brilliantly intuitive!
So what is a person to do when his cellphone starts to act up and the replacements aren’t any better equipment. Additionally, it appears that your cellular company is into S&M bondage, informing you that their hand are tied up, and they really don’t want them untied!
Dude, it is Monday morning on the island of Kauai. The Martinsville NASCAR race was postponed Sunday because of rain all up and down the East Coast. The race was scheduled for the Green Flag to fall at 12 noon EDT, 6am Hawaiian time on FOX.
Well I set my alarm for 5:50 am so that I can get up and be prepared for the beatin’ and bangin’ that ocur at this track. Well I find the FOX affiliate channel on my hotel TV only to find that these clowns in Hawaii are not showing the race on the live feed!
Oooohhhh nnnnoooo, it is much more important to show the cackameme “Morning in Hawaii Show” on FOX. Who gives a Rats Butt about the morning traffic on H1, or at Punch Bowl, or at the Ala Moana shopping center! Do I care about the lack of rain on the Islands or do I need to know that the “trade winds” will be decreasing over the next few day? Absolutely NOT!
Now FOX is showing “Live with Regis and Kelly”. Come on are these two programs more important than a good quality redneck broadcast of NASCAR at Martinsville?? Are the programmers for real? Who are they kidding?
This is the second time that I have had NASCAR withdrawals at this hotel! Last summer the Kauai Marriott hotel had trouble with their satellite provider and I could not get ESPN on the TV for a race. To say that I had a “Chapped Butt” last summer was an understatement! Now to be forced to watch “Live with Regis and Kelly”, instead of NASCAR from Martinsville, I am now feeling the need once again for my Boudreaux’s Butt Paste!
Dude, is there any influence that you, the chick that is the Speaker of the House or that other Dude in the Senate, Harry Reid, could exert with Rupert Murdoch, owner of FOX, to get the switch flipped so that I can please see the remaining part of the NASCAR race from Martinsville? Dude, it important to me that I am able to watch the race! Dude, can you help me out?
That’s right, you read it correctly! 2275 miles in 49 hours in a 2002 Suzuki Vitara, and we lived to talk about it!
It wasn’t originally planned to be a world wind rush through the Southern States, but it turned out to be exactly that. It was originally planned to be a three day trip, but even that plan was going to be ambitious.
After a rather long day at the Daytona 500, approximately 2 hours of delays while the grounds crew tried two different times to patch a large hole in the middle of turn 1 and 2, we ( my brother Jimmy and I) rushed to our awaiting car to begin the drive back to the West Coast. By the time that we climbed into our homeward transportation, it was 7:55 pm Sunday evening.
Our plan was to drive about 240 miles to around , Gainesville FL and call it an evening. But we were still feeling good when we approached Gainesville, so onward we went! We blew by Gainesville and Tallahassee like animal with the lower part of its anatomy on fire!! I gazed at my watch and noticed that it was almost midnight. Thinking back on the day, we got up that morning at 4 am in order to be guaranteed a primo parking spot on International Blvd. ( across the street from Daytona International Speedway). Nevertheless, two hours later (now 2 am) we both ran out of steam! We found a rest area, pulled the car into one of the parking lanes, grabbed our blankets that we bought the previous day that might keep us warm at the race track, reclined out seats, and commenced to try to grab “a few ZZZZZZ’s.”
Quite to my amazement, the sleep was short lived! In about 2 hours we were awakened by the sound of rain hitting the front windshield. We quickly gathered up our senses,”fired” up the Suzuki, and got back on the interstate heading West! It was now 4 am and we have a lot of real estate lying ahead of us!
Interstate 10 is a long lonely stretch of road to tackle, but we were up for the challenge. The rain posed a small problem, as rain always does, but lasted only for about 4 hours. Not to be deterred, we were off and on a mission!
The cities clicked off like miles on an odometer, Pensacola, Mobile, Pascagoula, Moss Point (more on these two cities later), Biloxi, New Orleans, Ponchatrain, Baton Rouge, Houston, and San Antonio. Finally at 10pm Monday night we decided to “shut it down” in Fort Stockton, TX and found a Holiday Inn Select for our sleeping needs. As a side note, upon waking up from my fantastic, but short, night of sleep in the Holiday Inn, I felt much much smarter than I did before I went to sleep! (Reference old Holiday Inn commercials!)
6am Tuesday morning, the wake up call comes! “Man was that a short night sleep”, I kept thinking as I was in the shower !!! It is time to get cleaned up, get checked out, hit Mickey D’s for some quick “body fuel”, and get doing a little Steppenwolf! For those of you too young to understand that reference, Steppenwolf was a 60′s band that sang “Born to be Wild”!! As in:
“Get your motor runnin’,
head out on the highway.
Lookin’ for adventure,
and what ever comes our way.”
So off we go on our way to Yuma, AZ. From Ft. Stockton westward the view is the same, desert, scrub brush, barren land, and cowboys! About 250 miles later we passed through a town that sparked another song in my head, an old Martin David Robinson tune, better known as Marty Robbins, the classic was from the 60′s as well. It goes something like this:
“Out in the west Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl.
Nighttime would find me at Rosa’s contina;
Music would play and Felina would whirl.
Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina,
Wicked and evil while casting a spell.
My love was deep for this Mexican maiden;
I was in love but in vain, I could tell.”
However the song was short lived just like everything else that day, cause we pulling a Hank Snow, “I’m moving on!”!
To sum up the 2275 mile trek in 49 hours it would go like this:
Scenically fast, conversationally great, and the company was the best! Additionally, overseeing the safety of his two boys, I know, was our dad, Archie Wilson Hammack!!
