October 24, 2008

Recovery Time

I apologize for the delay in progress updates. I dropped my laptop while in the ICU waiting room. Whoops. Luckily, all that it needs is a new hard drive. I might even be able to recover some of my photos, the last two months of which have not been backed up.

My father is recovering. It'd be a stretch to say he's doing well, but for a guy who had his chest chopped open and his heart stopped for a couple of hours, he's downright peachy.

The surgery itself was not without complications. Just as they were starting, his heart stopped. Rather than try to restart it, they just rushed through opening the chest and hooking him into the heart-lung machine, which had been part of the original plan. The head surgeon told me "If you're going to have your heart stop, the best place in the world would be on the table in a cardiac OR with a team assembled. Still, if he'd waited ten more minutes, it would have saved me a lot of sweat."

When we got to see him, he had been extubated, although he's got a mask on and lots of plumbing hooked into his neck and arm. He was loopy from the drugs, making him rather more argumentative than normal. He was also having some issues with bleeding, so he got blood, plasma, and platelets crammed into his veins. He tired quickly, so we went to a late lunch/early dinner at a Sayre restraunt.

We went back again later in the afternoon, and he was looking better; much less pale, better vital signs, more coherent in conversation. He had a list of things for his childen to do (pay bills, teach a class for 6th-graders, see about an absentee ballot…), and talked on the phone for a little bit. He was also concerned with how his parents were taking this, to his credit.

So, he's doing all right for now. I'll be back at the hospital tomorrow, perhaps after dropping my laptop off for repairs in Corning. So email and web updates may not be quite as frequent.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:52 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Thanks for the updates, whatever the stress and computer complications.

Posted by: margaret at Saturday, October 25 2008 12:51 AM (M0Mid)

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