Today I drove Dad to his new General Practitioner, who works in downtown Corning. The GP is part of the Guthrie network, which meant his computers were linked into the hospital computers, so he could pull up Dad's history very easily.

He was not happy when Dad started talking about his problems over the last few days, and not happy with his lung sounds. Then Dad mentioned that he'd been having pain in his shoulder, and the doc became downright unhappy. Sure, the people at the surgeon's office had said that the pain was just afteraffects of the surgical retractor, but a man with a recent history of heart problems presents with pain in the upper torso? That's textbook.

So the doc called in an EKG, and compared it with the results of Dad's post-surgery EKG, and that's when he said the line that forms my title.

The hospital wasn't far, and I'm generally calm, so I drove us over. It was nice to walk into a crowded ER and get seen immediatly.

The ER doc looked over the EKGs, poked and prodded and listened, then took some chest X-rays and compared them to the X-rays taken on Monday and the ones taken two weeks ago. Meanwhile, Dad's hooked up to the monitors, and I'm unhappy about the way it keeps flashing warnings like "Respiration Rate High!"

The good news is, it turns out to be nothing unusual. There is fluid building up around Dad's left lung, and that fluid is preventing his lungs from expanding properly. Thus frequent and difficult breathing, weakness, fatigue, sleep interruption, the whole deal. Getting fluid like that is common, and it was visible on the X-rays on Monday, just less of it. That fluid is naturally reabsorbed, so if there aren't any symptoms, they leave it alone.

Well, we've obviously got symptoms, so they're going to take action. For the moment, he gets to get another nice night of sleep in the hospital. (Corning Hospital this time, not Robert Packer.) In the morning, the cardiac and pulmonary specialists are going to look him over and decide what to do. The ER doc said that the standard treatment is just to locally anesthasize a small area on the back, and stick a large-bore needle into the fluid pocket to drain it. But it's not a treatment that needed done instantly, since putting Dad on supplemental oxygen was helping him nicely. I'll be going back to the hospital tomorrow morning, and we'll see what the treatment ends up being.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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