2001 - 2002

As you can tell, these were taken all the same day.  First two are at a lake in Southbury, CT.  and the other two were outside of my house.  All four were taken in October of 2002.

This is a bad picture of me taken

at the Buick Open only a few

months after my operations.

Taken 07/02

These pictures always need full explanation of why.  Well, back in April of 2002...towards the end of the month.  I had two different types of bacteria infect my left hip area.  The bacteria ate away at the muscle and skin on my left upper thigh.  I had to get four operations to drain the bacteria which was close to getting into my blood stream and killing me.  People always see these pictures and ask me, so here is the explanation.  The first picture is me with a beard.  I was in so much pain and stuck in bed for the two weeks I was there.  It took me a long time to gain half of my strength back, and awhile to regain my balance.  You can see the IV machine with a gray box above it.  That box is a morphine push button machine so I could give myself small doses of morphine every ten minutes.  That's just an idea of the pain I went through.  They had to pack my 11 inch wound full of gauze under the skin.  Each morning, the resident surgeon came to remove the gauze which was a painful process.  So I would be really tired and half asleep all day.  Eventually I even saw things that weren't really there from the morphine.  The second picture is me getting a shave.  I was too weak to do it, so the nurse did it for me.  I was pretty much passed out there.  The third picture was taken in October.  No, its not my butt crack, its about 2/3s of the scar that was left after the whole thing.  It was 7 months after.  It has healed much more since then.  It doesn't look as bad, most of the feeling is back in that area.