Sunday, September 13, 2009

My Dad is really back now. We started telling him about all the people who had called and he said that we should tell them – the operation would have been a whole lot easier to take if they hadn’t ‘field dressed’ him. For those that are hunting terminology challenged this is when the slice the deer’s chest open and empty a good amount of the unnecessary insides for easier transport. A little morbid, but for a family that hunts often, quite funny. His alarms went off and the monitor said he was tachy – or as I told him ‘tacky’. He smiled. Until the nurse came in and explained that the reason for the alarm was that his heart was beating too fast – atricular something. She would have to give him some medication to see if that helped bring it back down. At that moment an artist could have painted us all leaning over a huge precipice and it couldn’t have been more accurate. She tried to tell us it was normal for patients who had just undergone heart surgery and if the medications didn’t work they would just have to apply a little electric shock to his heart to ‘reset’ it. ‘Normal’?? That isn’t normal! We got through it as his heart rate steadily dropped back down to where it should be, but it still served as a reminder that we weren’t out of the woods yet. This one event meant one more night in ICU, maybe two. At least that was what it meant for the hospital, for us it meant worry-recall.

I would have thought that without the distractions of my kids I’d get a lot done, catch up on work, school, and maybe even find time to practice my guitar in between visits to the cardio unit. I hadn’t counted on just how drained I would feel. All I want to do now is return to the apartment and crawl into bed. Unfortunately good sleep is eluding me, just like my handle on all the other items I desperately need to complete. I’ll take it though, and once he gets a little better I’ll be back on top of things – for now it’s enough that he is going to get better.