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December 15, 2002

Back in Mammoth, Dad's doing fine!

I'm home now, left Phx yesterday morning. My dad was able to go home, sooner than the doctors expected, , just 3 days after having quadruple bypass surgery. Modern medicine is amazing. It was a good trip and left me with a lot to think about, so I have plenty of fodder for my next couple entries, but I wanted to tell the story of my dad's surgery first.

A couple weeks ago, my mom was going to go in for one of those Ameri-scans. Its one of those full-body scanning places they have in some malls. Needless to say, they aren't all completely reputable, if controversial at the least. She was going in for just a heart scan. She implored my dad to go and after some protest, he agreed. After the scan, the scan tech sat them down and said, "I'm not supposed to be telling you this now because your results are supposed to be analyzed and mailed to you in a week or two, but you have some major clogging and need to see a Dr. immediately." So they went to their cardiologist, who recommended a stress test. In this test, they measure your resting heart rate, then have you run on a treadmill for as long as you can while they take tons of measurements. My dad passed with flying colors, which isn't surprising because he eats healthy and exercises daily with my mom. So now they had two conflicted results. My mom wanted to do an angio-gram, but the Dr. said he was fine and didn't need it. My mom pushed it and the Dr. finally agreed to schedule him for a highly accurate nuclear angio-gram. In this test, they put this die in your blood and watch it as it flows through your heart and arteries. He went in last monday (the 9th) and had his angio-gram at 5am. Their cardiologist spoke to them immediately after the exam and told my dad he needed triple heart bypass surgery immediately and should stay in the hospital. He then began to tell them the good news that a surgeon was available to do one tomorrow. My mom was about to protest because she had researched and found the surgeon she wanted, but before she could he told her the name of the surgeon that was available, which happened to be the same surgeon.

It was at this point that I found out what was going on and started the long drive to phx. On this trip I listened to The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. I have lots to say about that, but not in this entry. I saw him tuesday morning just before surgery. He looked very good. They took him away at about 11 and the Dr. came out of surgery at 3. He said it went exceptionally well and he was recovering fine. He used a relatively new form of open heart surgery where you don't need to stop the heart and put the patient on a heart/lung machine. You do the cutting and suturing while the patients heart continues to beat. Not sure how that works, but it does and recovery is much faster. We saw him right after surgery and he didn't look that good. His color was good, and I was prepared for all the tubes sticking out of him, but his breathing was erratic and the monitor he was hooked up to kept giving an arrhythmia warning. They said it was normal. He had a breathing tube down his throat, a GI tube down his nose (that gets rid of stomach acid), two drain tubes in his chest, and a 'swan', which went in through one of the major arteries in his neck, went all the way into his heart and floated in his heart taking accurate readings, plus a catheter.

The next morning we went back and were amazed to find him totally awake and lucid. He looked good and they even had him walking around the ICU. Its amazing how much we've learned about the healing process, like how they make you walk as soon as you wake up. It aids in the recovery because the patient feels like their healing. Finally, modern medicine is beginning to acknowledge the link between the mental state of the patient and that patients healing. They even say positive things to the patient while they are out cold during surgery because its aids in recovery after the fact. He spent the next couple days in ICU where we spent most of the days ourselves by his bed. He was on pain medication on and off and they came in hourly to do blood tests and check other things. Finally, on Friday at 4am they moved him out of the ICU. Monday at 6pm he left the hospital. He's home now walking around and recovering.

Recovery from open heart surgery is a long slow procedure. Mostly because your chest has to heal. He has surgical wire fastening his sternum together. This wire will remain in his chest permanently, though it will not set off metal detectors. He is not allowed to drive or lift anything over 5 lbs for 6 weeks. He should be mostly recovered in 6 months. He WILL be able to travel to my nieces birth in 6 weeks. My brother is having a baby. The most amazing thing is that they caught it before he had a heart attack. Most of these surgeries come after the person already has a heart attack because until then, they don't know anythings wrong. My family has a history of heart problems. I, however, am optimistic because I have been eating healthy and exercising from a young age, with only a 5 year hiatus. I will have to get regularly tested myself starting somewhere around 30 though, just in case. In the end, my dad is going to recover fine and I am very happy that this very serious situation didn't escalate. There are times I dog on technology, but medical science has come so far and is so amazing, I can't imagine what we'll see next.

In the last week I've had a lot of time to think and have a lot to write about. I am going to try and spread this out over a number of entries so as not to overwhelm myself or you, the reader :) I will be ruminating on such things as, the problems with logic, mythos over logos, science and religion, the theory of theories, the first singularity and the big bang, my trip back to my elementary school, and much more. I will also be posting some stuff I wrote a year ago which suddenly seems relevant to the things I'm thinking about. Lets hope I have the discipline to really cover this stuff for my own benefit.

Thanks to all those that called and wrote expressing their concern for my father. It meant a lot to me.

Posted by wonko at December 15, 2002 06:13 PM

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Posted by: useEvil at December 17, 2002 10:32 PM

Posted by: Dad at December 19, 2002 09:04 PM

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