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Tim W Long

timlong

Many of you will know Tim, and many more will have read his books. He’s going through an extremely tough patch at the moment. I’ll let his girlfriend Katie explain: “On Wednesday, Tim woke up with what he thought was a sour stomach from drinking bad wine while watching the election or possibly a late con crud. By 3 pm, I was rushing him to the hospital after he passed out at home from what looked like to me as a massive GI bleed in process. He almost passed out in triage and was immediately rushed back to the ER. He appeared stable for several hours, but then had a bleed out in which he lost 1/3 of his total body fluid volume. He was literally one minute away from a full code. He’s been in critical care since then.

However, he does not have a typical GI bleed like an ulcer in his stomach. He has a tumor that has developed an ulcer and will not stop bleeding even after two attempts to cauterize it via EGD. It was decided last night that even though he is very anemic that he will not be able to continue to lose so much blood and that there is potential for the tumor to bleed further. He is very weak and tired. It appears that it might have been bleeding for a couple weeks but not enough that he noticed. He has been complaining about being tired but he is always working super hard on something so we both dismissed it.

He’s had 5 units of blood, roughly 16 liters of fluid. and a lot of protonix.

I am writing this with Tim’s permission. Even though I’ve wanted to scream and cry to everyone that there was a problem, we decided not to release any information until today. He is currently in surgery to have a resection of his bowel and I hope to see him in about 3 hours. Everything looks good except for the fact he is so anaemic.

Don’t get me wrong, Tim is very sick. He does not want visitors for local folks right now. Also, he is too weak to be on his phone or his computer. It would be really awesome if people left messages of support on his wall for him to see when he is stronger on Sunday or Monday.

Tim served in the navy as an engineer for four years during the first Iraq War which is why I mention Veteran’s Day.

I love him very much and I don’t know if I can understand a world without him. It was a rocky start here at the hospital, but after everyone saw how sick he is, they have done nothing but work hard to get him stable and try to fix this problem.

Once again, if you want to send support, post it on his wall. I will show him over the next couple of days and I have faith by Monday he will be back on social media wisecracking with everyone and writing books.

TheFront

If you feel helpless and want to do anything else, financially, we would appreciate if you buy a book. As a full-time writer, he loses money every day he is not writing or promoting his work.

I suggest THE FRONT for the holiday.

Katie updated yesterday to say that “Tim made it through surgery without any significant issues. His colour is coming back to his face, he is more alert (even talking about his books to his nurses), and everything looks good… he is still pretty weak but we think he has turned a corner.”

Please consider buying one (or more) of Tim’s books in support. For my part, I’m knuckling down to finish the (horrendously overdue) second book in Tim and Craig DiLouie’s THE FRONT series. I’m a couple of weeks away from wrapping it up, and I look forward to sending it to Craig and Tim shortly.

Best wishes, Tim. We’re thinking of you. Get well soon.