My poor wife has had a terrible time with her health, all related to her chronic back pain. She has been hospitalized 3 consecutive times within 6 months. The first time was for heart problems caused by severe, level 10 pain, impacting her heart rate and blood pressure. That caused her to get a heart oblation surgery. It was followed by a blood infection and pneumonia that kept her in hospital for a week and then a Transitional Care Unit (TCU Nursing Home) for 2 weeks. Finally the underlying cause was diagnosed as Osteomyelitis, which landed her in the hospital another week, and then a TCU for 6 weeks.

Osteomyelitis is an infection within the bone. In her case it was in her lower spine. It's like a large puss filled pimple, but in the bone. The pain in unbelievable. She couldn't even move without screaming. I had to nearly carry her to the bathroom, and often the pain was so bad she couldn't even go, once there. She even begged me to kill her, and later the same to a shocked doctor. The condition is very serious. It can cause the bone to die, and the infection itself can cause fever and death. An MRI disclosed the condition. Imagine the pain she endured while stuck in that metal tube for 45 minutes. Doctors said the cyst must have been there a while, as it was so large.

She is home now. The infection is gone, and her chronic back pain has returned to its level 5-6 baseline.

A pick-line is an IV stent that feeds through an artery directly into her heart. The picture shows the entry point of her line. The associated dressing had to be changed once a week by a qualified RN, as did the twice daily feed-in of the IV antibiotics.

This poem is a Sevenelle.
I was introduced to it by fellow Fanstorian, damommy, through her poem, A Bit of Fun, as part of the Potlatch club.
The Sevenelle is a stanzaic poem, an invented form created by Virginia Noble which cannot only be found in 'Pathways' but is also in the Study and Writing of Poetry book by Amy Jo Zook and Wauneta Hackleman, 1996.

The Sevenelle is:
- stanzaic, written in no less than 2 septets, each made up of a rhymed couplet, tercet and couplet in that order, combined into th overall 7 line Septet.
- metric, iambic tetrameter.
- rhymed, aabbbCC ddeeeCC etc.
- composed with L6 & L7 of the first stanza repeated as refrain in the last 2 lines of all subsequent stanzas.

For this poem, I used 4 stanzas.

This photograph was taken by the author himself on February 28, 2019.

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