04/17/2026
I do an anniversary shout out thanking Wayne Barber every year on April 6th. My heart and emotional state has just been way too overwhelmed lately and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it because this is a goodbye to that part of my life and that is more than I can bere most days. I don’t know who I am anymore. I ran with what Wayne taught me 20 years ago and did my best to make him proud. I was interviewed by Fox News, won many local and statewide awards all the way to being a national Locksmith Ledger “Locksmith Legend” I hope to one day find another way to fill that void in my life to help others every day. I can’t see past today anymore. So Wayne, thank you from the bottom of my very being for teaching me a trade that filled that need in me to help others and yet put money into the checking account. I met thousands of people over the years and had some wonderful experiences. Of course there were some horrible and scary ones mixed in there as well, but what’s life without a few new learning experiences once in a blue moon? I will do my best to literally get up on one foot again, though that’s truly the best case scenario.
For anyone who doesn’t know what happened…in November of 2025 I laid down one afternoon to take a nap and by the next day was unresponsive and taken to the hospital by ambulance. I went from the ER to the ICU as I had become septic. By the next morning I was on life support and in full on Septic Shock. (don’t ask me the difference between sepsis and septic shock for I do not know. I just know that they keep insisting there is.) While on life support Atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome and Acquired Purpura Fulminans decided they wanted to join my internal playground and though it’s been said any of the three alone should have killed me I survived all three at once. Both my hands had to be amputated on January 2nd. On January 4, 2026 I was moved to a nursing home. I have little day to day memory of the 45ish days in the hospital, month in the nursing home nor the past two months laying in this damn hospital bed in the living room here at home. Perhaps that is God’s way of protecting me from myself? They were going to amputate both legs above the knee at one point in time. I now have hope one will be a partial foot amputation and the other one a below the knee. I have a long road a head of me with new specialists seemingly added almost monthly. Some very encouraging, others literal pieces of, you know what, that I hope to never see you again. 
PS…anyone local with a 3D printer? I think I may need some help designing a special forearm crutch for each arm. Of course my hand amputations are quite different from one another, and apparently everybody else in the world as well. Leave it to me to not be normal ha ha. I will need two separate sets of crutches ones for when I’m wearing my hand prosthetics and ones for when I am not.
