Month: May 2010

Well, last night I went into the ER, again. The stress from work plays merry hell with my immune system and I keep getting odd cellulitis issues… This time it’s my right ear.

So they check me in, put me in a little room, on what amounts to a fancy recliner, and start a gram of Vencomyacin via IV (200ml over 1 hour) – about ten minutes into it I started to have a reaction to the medication, got up, and flagged down a receptionist… No call light in the room there at the Aurora hospital for some weird reason.

By the time they found someone who was able to turn off the infusion pump I was blacking out…

The brain, once again, is an amazing thing: I can tell you exactly what happened, even though my blood pressure had dropped below 70, I was ‘taching’ heart-wise, had lost all contact with everything outside of my core, was siezing (my hands were stuck in a full spread, actually arched back, for several minutes and are still sore), and my throat closed up making breathing a real chore…

Within seconds that little room had about half a dozen people in it; they pulled a ton of warmed blankets out of a big blue heater thing (said 140 degrees on the readout) and put them on me, I heard one doctor call for 50mg of diphenhydramine directly into the IV, which a nurse promptly did. Another doctor was leaning over me telling me that the shot to stop the reaction was ‘going to really mess me up’ while another nurse was holding a mask thing to my face – I think it was oxygen, but it was the typical squeezy respiration thing you see in the movies.

For me, I just dropped into a dissociative state as my body was basically disconnected from my brain. Everything in my field of view had a blue tinge and it appeared to me that I was viewing the world through a tube.

For the rest of the trip I just concentrated on controlling my breathing and heart rate – I’m fairly good at controlling myself and I didn’t want any of my mental “freakout” to impair anything the doctors were doing, so I just stayed tranced out with slow deep breaths and my eyes closed, only speaking to answer questions.

The shot they gave me worked pretty quick, I’d say it took about 3-5 minutes to take full effect and get me breathing on my own again. It took about 15 minutes to get feeling back in my hands and feet and I apparently sweated out about a gallon as I was terribly parched yet completely soaked… They had to peel me off the recliner thing to get me onto a gurney.

They promptly rolled me off to a real room where they EKG’d me and put me on fluids. I got the shakes pretty bad as the meds wore off – felt like I was freezing to death for about 20 minutes and had a hard time talking through my chattering – so out came another pile of warmed blankets.

A couple hours later and I was mostly okay, if a bit woozy, and they sent me home. I’m on oral antibiotics again, of which one makes me light sensitive and the other makes me a vegetarian – So I’m essentially the world’s only vegetarian vampire for the next two weeks.

Whee!

So, yeah, the getting better keeps getting worse. It’s enough to make ya feel old or something.

Well, today I proceeded with intent to purchase a 1960’s AT&T communications site out near Kutch Colorado.

Being as this is a cold-war era communications facility it was built to withstand World War III – 1.5 foot thick DoD grade steel reinforced concrete walls, three inch thick steel blast doors, nuclear blast wave rated 50 foot free standing tower, and located in a geographically secure location out on the Eastern plains.

These sites were built to handle military telephone communications using microwave point-to-point systems in the 4, 6, and 11Ghz bands. The Kutch site was part of a fail-over communications system for NORAD in Colorado Springs and was the carrier for communications traffic between Calhan and Hugo.

Since the late 90’s some friends and I have researched these old cold warriors and have tracked down most of them in Colorado, taking lots of photos along the way.

Back in 2000 AT&T liquidated several of these sites across the US and they were bought by American Tower, a cell site wholesaler, and by 2002 American Tower had determined which towers were close enough to civilization to be worth keeping and renting, and dumped the remainder on the market.

Back in 2002 we desperately wanted to buy one of these sites, but none of us were in the proper position to do so. So we continued finding and documenting these sites and enjoying the state-wide scavenger hunt, when in 2004 I ran into a fellow named Kent who happened to own one of these sites at Atwood which was in nearly original condition… So we drove up and met with Kent, took a couple DVDs worth of media, thanked him and went on our way.

Fast forward six years… I was on the ColdWarComms list and talking with folks about these sites and I mentioned Kutch. Well it turns out Kent owned Kutch as well and sent me an email asking if was interested in buying it. So I talked it over with these friends and after some deliberation, decided to buy it.

Today we looked over the site in detail and will be signing the paperwork this week to acquire the deed.