I can't wait until the day I have children of my own...

But to date my most life changing experience was last September at the age of 23. I had always been healthy, and never experienced any real health problems until one day what I thought was the stomach flu turned into the most excruciating pain of my life. I started losing consciousness and was unable to stand up from the incredible pain in my stomach. To keep a long story as short as possible I ended up on an operating table where they discovered I had suffered a freak anurism(sp?) in an artery above my stomach, and I was interlnally rupturing lots of blood. I heard afterward that the operation did not go quite as planned, and a few hours in, a specialist was called, to come in at 1:30 in the morning and determine the source of bleeding. He was able to get me fixed up. Where the last report they had given my dad was 1 in 3 chances of making it. 56 staples later, a week in the hospital and a scar that goes vertical literally down my entire stomach to below the pant line I guess I got lucky. At least that is what the doctor told me. This happened totally out of left field and I would have never seen it coming, but I almost lost everything. That defiantly changed the way I look at a lot of things.

~Joe