THE DAILY DERRIERE

A Shadow Called Danger, Episode 7, August 3, 2026

Happy Monday, y’all. I apologize for being almost a month late in posting this episode. My extenuating circumstance is that I had a heart attack on July 9th, spent 5 days in the hospital and had to return to the ER the morning after my release on July 14th because I developed a hematoma in my groin after I got home. Suffice it to say that I no longer prioritize our weekly Monday morning deadline.

Y’all,

I suffered a heart attack on Thursday, July 9th, at 6:30 AM. The pain started as I was getting undressed to take my morning shower. The pain started in my upper left torso, spread to include my sternum, and was accompanied by nausea. It was four to five on a scale of ten so I waited in vain a few minutes for it to pass. I took my shower, dressed, and called my husband, Richard Rangel, who was visiting his rental property in the High Desert. After leaving a voicemail, I used Uber to take me to the ER at Glendale Memorial Hospital, (my alma mater, where was taken there when I had my stroke back in 2013).

Richard returned my call when I was being prepped for surgery. He said he’d return to L.A. immediately, reaching the hospital soon after I was taken to my room in the ICU after my trip to the surgical theater in the hospital’s basement.

The staff cardiologist identified two problem areas; an occluded stent that I had placed in 2017, and a 70% occluded right ventricle, both with calcium. “Why do you have so much calcium? Are you taking supplements?” When I assured him I was not, he grumble, “Must be genetic”.

They went in through my right wrist, taking an hour and a half to “cross” my occluded artery and to install a new stent, way more time than anticipated. They decided to wait until Friday morning to do the other, more difficult, procedure on my right Ventricle. The goal was to unblock it and install a stent, but the situation was worse than anticipated, since the ventricle turned out to be 95% blocked and my artery was an elaborate, extended corkscrew. They had to pull out because I was bleeding too heavily from the catheter insertion point. They put a “pressure block” (an inflatable 2” plastic ball strapped around my pelvis) on the wound and sent me back to ICU. I was ordered to lay flat on my back, completely immobile (especially my right leg) for the next 6 hours. The pain relievers they administered were woefully inadequate. I would have called it endurable, but I felt no recourse to endure. In retrospect, I should have screamed and moaned, instead of suffering in silence. Squeaky wheel and all that. Lesson learned.

I spend the weekend under observation, poked and tested, my vitals continually monitored. Periodically asked if I had any chest pains (not since the abortive Friday morning procedure). The area around my groin insertion point was poked every couple of hours to see if I was soft and spongy, or getting firm and hard, an indicator of internal bleeding. They decided I could wait 4 to 5 weeks, until my groin area healed, before re-attempting the right ventricle procedure at Glendale Adventist Hospital, where they have more advanced equipment.

I am home now, regaining my strength and mobility. On the plus side, I’m more alert, awake and aware than I’ve been for several years- I’m not struggling to wake up in the morning, and I’m not drowsing during the day. On the minus side, I developed a hematoma Tuesday night, just hours after my late-afternoon release from Glendale Memorial. Only a two-to-three on the pain scale, but scary enough to send me back to the E.R. on Wednesday morning. A CAT scan revealed it was an isolated pocket of blood, best treated by staying off my feet and icing it. It has gone down but not away.

Happy New Comics Day,  Y’all. Welcome to “A Shadow Called Danger, Season Two, Episode Six! 

Mike told me recently of an imminent event, now top-secret, but will potentially draw a lot of attention to this intellectual property when the event occurs. This could be fantastic; one of my regrets about this project is the sparseness of the audience response. But if we get increased attention, how will we deal with it? I paid a web designer to develop a site for the strip, but working on it in its dormant stage was sucking all my time away in the summer of ’25. I had to tell Mike, “We can either have a website or we can have more pages”. Mike hasn’t had the time either, so we’re stuck with no website, no way for people to contact us, to buy copies of the book, ask to interview us, etc etc.

I’m putting it out there to the ASCD fan base and to anybody: Does anybody want to step forward and volunteer to take our dormant WordPress-designed website live and run it for us?