I am afraid I must be the bearer of some bad news regarding Catspaw. It seems he went to the hospital with what he thought was a kidney stone and it turned out to be a dissecting aneurism. I am going to paste the email texts into this post so you can all read for yourselves. As soon as Wayne and Connie give me more information regarding how we can send cards, flowers or whatever, I will get it to you. In the meantime, please pray, meditate, think good thoughts or whatever you do for our friend. I will keep you all posted as I hear any new information. We are a community, and I know we will all pull together on this one.

One last thing. Until I know for sure, let's not flood Wayne and Connie with emails re: Catspaw. I will act as the go between and post regular updates as I receive them until we have a way to send email to Pat, or until Connie and Wayne say it is OK to email them. That way we won't be burdening them any further. As you will see in their message, they are very distraught.

Mick

Mick:

Wayne and I want to write back to you as soon as this weekend is over. But I feel I need to contact you sooner with important info. Pat was admitted to the local hospital today with what they thought was a kidney stone (details later) and turned out to be a dissecting aneurysm. He was life flighted to a bigger hospital in Columbus-- where they determined that it is worse than first thought prior to transport. Additional cat scans revealed it was even more extensive than they thought but not the worst case scenerio where they would have to transport again to a trauma hospital with a cardiac surgeon and a heart pump. More details I'll send later.

Catspaw is by no means out of the woods. If your dear grandmother taught you to pray --now would be a good time...of course, if she didn't now might be an excellent time to start....

Thanks~later~Connie and Wayne

and then there is this which came today

Mick just talked to Karen on the phone with an update on Pat. He is not out of the woods at this point. Prognosis is still not good. Dr. hoping to deal with this medicaly...that by keeping his pressure down the aeorta will heal vs. surgery...which is quite risky at this point as his blood pressure is up and the aneurysm is so near to his heart.

Pat and Karen are the dearest friends we have on earth...actuallly we count them as family...we are closer to them thatn to anyone in our families on either side. They are both one of a kind. I would go on with that thought except that in order to keep functioning at this point I need to stay out of the affective domain and with the black and white facts of what's happening and how we need to move to accomadate the last/next set of challenges.

Karen was glad that I e-mailed you last night and agreed that Pat would want you to know and also that you would know what to do with this info in terms of "mudcatters".

Thanks for your help on this and your friendship to Pat. More as it develops or once a day if nothing changes.

~Connie