As we barrel into another Thanksgiving Week, I’ll be the first to tell you this one is going to be really different for me. It’s been several months since I have been able to share my musings with you and, to be real blunt, I came as close to dying as I ever have in my life when my infections turned really angry less than a month ago.

There I was, in the middle of another set of frantic surgeries in a far-away hospital, when “The Grim Reaper” came by my hospital room. If you choose not be believe that, then I bless you for your opinion. But I was there and I need to tell all those who have written and called and prayed and cared that this Thanksgiving I’ll be a different guy and I pray in return it is the one you, not to mention my blessed mother, have longed to finally see.

Now some of you are already laughing, and that’s well and good. You’ve been with me in the bars with the honky-tonk pianos, those with the girls in their pretty dresses as we’ve cut quite a swath through most particularly the Southeastern United States in, lo, these last 60 years.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve had more fun than any Navy that ever sailed, but I’ve have also got to be as starkly honest as I have ever been in sharing that these last three or four weeks have easily been the most wonderful I have ever known in my lifetime. Trust me; dying is over-rated.

To fill in those who do not know me well, I am a twice-divorced father of two who lives with my dog near Chattanooga, Tn. I have been phenomenally lucky in just over a year by being able to write a daily blog of sorts for a dear friend who owns a website called Chattanoogan.com, and I have found that telling stories is indeed my life’s passion.

I’m hardly a newcomer to this game, having worked for my family at the old Chattanooga News-Free Press for most of my adult life. For 36 years I worked in our “toy department” (read “sports”) and had some luck at it, a flock of my tales ending up in Reader’s Digest and some other neat places.

The thing is I was totally unprepared for - when a gentle psychiatrist finally lured me back to writing from a self-imposed exile of sorts - was the Internet. I had sworn I would never write again after things went sour for me, but I had missed it terribly over the next 10 years. I started back in August of 2007.

Then, when Google and Yahoo and other big search engines started making my little tales more available during the last year, I would get hundreds of e-mails in return, sometimes in the same day. For thirsty me, there has never been a sweeter or more wonderful wine, and, during the past several months when I have been so horribly sick, I have missed it so much.

Back in 1971, I was a foolish kid driving a Jeep when we wrecked and I crushed my right elbow. Braced with an idiot’s braggadocio, I promptly went water-skiing in the heavy plaster cast several weeks later, and therein began a tale of … well, self denial and blatant stupidity.

I would play golf or tennis every day just to show I could and, by the summer of 1990, I had wrecked my right arm in somewhat spectacular fashion. Since then I have had well over 100 different surgeries that I only count if the procedure lasts over an hour and requires an overnight stay in the hospital.

Even better is the statistic that this year alone – just in 2008 - I’ve now had 28 go-to-sleep encounters with the scalpel and its accompanying morphine, neither of which is a very good dance partner. I now have more drugs in me than a Walgreen’s storeroom and carry around a more impressive list of the world’s greatest infections than you’ll find in a Third World country.

I’ve got “strep.” I’ve got “staph.” I’ve even got a little fungal potboiler called Candida Parapsilosiis that I’ll guarantee you, when added to the other killers I carry, is worse than Kryptonite ever was to Superman. My nickname at the greatest hospital in the world is “Complication” and this week the King of Saudi and I were wheeled down the same hall together.

This isn’t meant to be a braggart’s journal. Last Monday I pleaded with a Chattanooga surgeon to cut my arm off. Right then. That day. Later in the week I was at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota only to learn I am still too infected to do the extensive surgery it will take to keep the arm attached. How am I doing?

So, no, this isn’t bragging as much as it is an effort to tell you that in the next five or six days, the Lord willing, I want to write some stories about being thankful that I hope will show you my heart and what’s it about before Thursday’s feast.

I hope each tale will stand alone. These little serial stories have always driven me crazy, sort of like singing a song’s different verse only the next day.

The other confession is that I now just plan one day to the next. If suddenly I have to stop that’ll mean there is … er, more pressing business at hand, so speak, and we’ll have to wait to resume until “next time.”

But as I finally write again with just one hand, it’s a real big deal for me and I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s stories on Chattanoogan.com.

I don’t think you’ll be bored.

royexum@aol.com