BILL CADY Word Count: 149,227 - At My Friend's Place

Bill Cady, The Early Years … by Bill Cady 279
sidewalk work to sewer repair to boiler repair to cleaning out an eight story furnace six
feet in diameter to changing the lights outside that chimney on the top, to servicing
turbine engines, and more. Lotsa stuff.
It was a Monday morning during a hot summer month. Muggy, very sticky, the
humidity almost off the charts. I had a hangover that would stop a charging water buffalo
in his tracks. Even that early, around nine in the morning, the outside temp was a bit over
eighty and as muggy as any day Alabama will ever see. Inside, up atop the boiler where I
was assigned to work, the temp was around a hundred and ten. I could‟ve had lunch by
dropping some eggs at my feet on that boiler. They‟d‟ve fried up in no time.
Head pounding, feeling I had to barf every two or three minutes, I kept at it.
Then, as if predestined, it overcame me. I passed out and fell from twenty feet up.
Landed on a steel box about halfway down, then continued my flop to a concrete floor.
It was, all in all, what you‟d have to call “A Bad Day At Black Rock”.
Unconscious, I can only assume an ambulance came and sped my sorry ass to
E.W. Sparrow Hospital. I was admitted, then probed, picked, and examined by every
person in that damned building with a white coat. Careful investigation revealed I had, at
the tender age of eighteen, a peptic ulcer, aka a bleeding ulcer.
Just to slip you some insider info, so you can stay with this whole deal, a peptic
ulcer is generally seen in the medical community as “not a good thing”. To anyone who
suffers from it, nightmare is a much better term.
They explained I‟d need a tube down my throat to suck out the acid and a host of
other disgusting items when I came out of surgery. Their attempts to insert it before my
operation always left me gagging and in pain.
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