UPDATE: From Tarmac to Operating Room

Well, the plan was to come home from Fiji, sleep for a few hours, and then start my new job. But as Steinbeck wrote, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Instead, I came home from Fiji, slept for a few hours, and then went straight into the hospital to have an operation on my infected leg...

By the time I had stepped off the Fiji-LA-Atlanta-Washington, DC flights, my leg had swollen to the size of Kobayashi's stomach after the Coney Island hot dog eating contest. First thing Monday morning I went to a doctor, who told me that I need to have leg surgery immediately. An hour later, I was waking up from the deepest sleep I've ever had with a golf-ball-sized chunk of my leg missing. Seriously, does this stuff happen to anybody else? At least this all happened on my last day of vacation and not in the middle. I would have hated to miss Everest.