To a Great and Strange Year by Deborah LeBlanc

At the end of 2007, I proclaimed that 2008 would be great! And so far, it has been….although in a strange sort of way.

For the last couple of weeks, I’d been fighting a bout of pneumonia. Those of you who’ve had this nasty piece of business, know it’s no fun. It seems to take forever before you start feeling human again, much less able to breathe properly. Well, last weekend, I started feeling a bit stranger than usual (yeah, I know, scary, huh?) and decided I should go to a small walk in clinic to get myself checked out. Dizziness, foggy brain, blurring vision, I’m thinking I’ve picked up an inner ear infection to go along with my handy-dandy pneumonia. Um…that self-diagnosis wasn’t quite right. Here’s the sequence of events that followed….

*Clinic closed and feeling worse in ten short minutes, decide to go to emergency room at local hospital.
*Local hospital runs blood work, urinalysis, yada, yada. Everything checks out fine.
*Local hospital decides to do a CAT Scan just to make sure
*Twenty minutes later, I’m being shipped off via ambulance to another hospital so I can be seen by a neurosurgeon. Deborah has a subdural hematoma. Frontal lobe no doubt.
*Get to second hospital, surgeon waiting. Another CAT Scan, another confirmation…yep, my brain is bleeding.
*Admit said Deborah into hospital and start running more tests than a Vanderbilt PreMed student.
*Blunt force trauma the surgeon explains. No, Deborah says, didn’t get bonked on the head.
*News of no trauma, traumatizes neurosurgeon. In come more specialists — hematologist, oncologist, internist….
*Two days of being stuck, prodded and poked, more CAT Scans, an EEG, MRI…
*Findings? Same subdural hematoma that has to be followed up with more CAT Scans until it dissipates or does something….oh, yeah, and they found a funky sinus disease that’s going to need surgery.

At the moment, my arms look like they belong to a heroin junky, but, hey, small price to pay to still have a half decently functioning brain, right? Fingers crossed it stays that way. Like I said, 2008 is gonna be great! I’m still alive, able to think, laugh, dream, write, and hope. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year has in store for me!


LeBlanc is the president of the Horror Writers Association, president of the Writers’ Guild of Acadiana, and an active member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the National Association of Women Writers, and International Thriller Writers Inc. In 2004, she created the LeBlanc Literacy Challenge, an annual, national campaign designed to encourage more people to read. Her most recent novels are: FAMILY INHERITANCE, GRAVE INTENT, A HOUSE DIVIDED, and MORBID CURIOSITY. Deborah’s next release, WATER WITCH, is scheduled to be on bookstore shelves in August ’08. Visit her site here: http://deborahleblanc.com/splash/index.cfm

Read an interview with Deborah LeBlanc at Roses & Thorns.