Dad's bad day

    When I went to visit Dad yesterday afternoon, he was fairly cheerful and feeling all right except that his belly was uncomfortable and he couldn't stop burping. Eventually he started coughing a bit and breathing fast. The nurse came by to check his blood sugar but was concerned about his breathing, especially when she wanted to listen to it with a stethoscope and asked him to breathe deeply and he couldn't.
    Then ensued a Marx Brothers stateroom scene: every medical professional in South Carolina piled into the room, mostly bringing equipment as well. Oxygen, chest X-rays, the whole deal. A deputy hospital administrator turned up as well. A cynic would say that somebody told them who Dr. Dantzler is. (Dr. Dantzler ran the Department of Health & Environmental Control for about 40 years.) But they're a good bunch up there and I really think they would have done this for anybody.
    Regardless, brother William arrived and slightly later Dad's fiancee Margaret did. We were stuck out in the corridor. The administrator told us Dad was being moved to the Intermediate ICU because he needed a little more care than they could give on the 6th floor. However, the new room needed to be cleaned so it would be about a half hour. (Note to hospital administrators: don't give specific times, because when the half hour turns into an hour, anxiety proliferates.)
    We were stuck in the ICU waiting area, a cell phone dead zone, for nearly an hour. I had already called our siblings in Boston and now couldn't get in touch, so was heading for the elevators to find somewhere I could phone out again when I met the same staffer who had led us down to the waiting area in the first place. She said Dad was in his new room, so we went. They weren't ready for us yet, so we got to hang out in another corridor. However, cell phone coverage returned, so I got to talk to all siblings not present.
    When we got to see Dad finally, we were pleased that he looked good and was holding up as well as could be expected. His speech behind the oxygen mask was hard to understand, though, which was maybe a bit worrying. I ran home to eat a bit and to pick up some food for Margaret at Lizard's Thicket. When I got back, William left, presumably also for food. As on the previous two days, Dad had low blood sugar, so they gave him juice and then dextrose and got it back up. The staffers were all really great. I had missed the doctor, but apparently all he said was they didn't know what the problem was.
    I left at about 10. My sister Anne (a doctor in Boston) was able to reach the nurse (Hillary) and got the story. The chest X-ray had shown something in both lungs, but they didn't know if it was pneumonia or something he'd inhaled or something else. Given the burping followed by coughing, one would think it would be the aspiration.(The fact that they aren't giving him antibiotics indicates that they don't much think that it's pneumonia.)
    Regardless, a respiratory therapist came by why I was still there and gave him a bronchial dilator, and that apparently helped a lot. By the time Anne talked to Dad, she could actually hear him over the phone, whereas I hadn't been able to hear him putting my ear by his mouth. So things were much improved as of last night at bedtime. The respiratory therapist said they were going to do the dilator again every few hours. She suggested he might not need the oxygen anymore by morning. Anyway, continued improvements are expected, and I'm looking forward to seeing him as soon as I can get over there.

That's so cuuute!

    I hear the above a lot when telling people that my 90-year-old dad has a 90-year-old girlfriend. Said in exactly the same tone as when a couple of seven-year-olds are caught kissing. Listen: old people are people, too. (So are seven-year-olds, come to think of it.) Life expectancy may not be stretching that much but death expectancy is going down, so you might well be a 90-year-old yourself someday. You'll probably want to maintain some kind of romance in your life. It's about all that's keeping my dad alive, which might explain my hypersensitivity.
    I don't think people mean to be demeaning. I think they're trying to say something very positive, and it's such an unusual situation that they're caught flat-footed. Here's a tip: "That's so great!" sounds a lot nicer and a lot less condescending than "That's so cuuute!"

Hoping for the best, dreading the worst

    Where the worst is Dad dying, and the next to worst is him spending the rest of his days bedridden or wheelchair bound. I think it's what we're all afraid of, especially him. He's doing a good job of acting brave, and we are, too. He's only getting an hour a day of physical therapy. It being Baptist Hospital, they skip Sundays. (If it were Communist Hospital, he'd be doing corvee service digging a canal for physical therapy, so there's that.) I wish they would at least teach him exercises to do in bed. It seems like a waste just lying there; that is, a waste for him.
    Yesterday, he said, "I don't think I've had any water." I answered as if it had been apropos of something, but it turned out he thought a nurse was there to give him insulin. You could call that hallucinating or you could call it dreaming and talking in his sleep. Either way it was more than a little disturbing. I don't want him having any more seizures, but if this is a side effect of Dilantin I'll be happier when he's off it.
    It hasn't been two weeks yet since the operation, and he did have a seizure afterward. So maybe it's too soon to expect him to get his balance back and be up and walking by himself. I don't care how long it takes; I just want it to happen.

Powered by bitterness and envy

(An extrapolation)
Little lady, 75
Loving and hoping and waiting
in vain.
Nothing left but the gall and the cataracts.
Which is blinding her worse none can say.
It's funny how the ones who marry only
the Prince of Peace
can hate so much.

5-7-5

(I am assured that the term for a 5-7-5 poem is senryu. Haiku is a specific type of senryu. As I recall, in the first two lines, you have to mention a season and in the third one you have to mention appropriate weather for the season. Or something like that. You could look it up.)
Living forever
alone is not as fun as
a short time coupled

Lazy S

    The move to adulthood many decades late marches on. Dad wants me to work on his estimated taxes due this month. Of course, he's already done all the heavy lifting, so it shouldn't be any major difficulty. And he'll be cutting the check so as not to upset the IRS by having a strange name on it. (I'll bring the checkbook.) But it's still a strange sense of grownupness that I haven't faced before. I'll probably start shaving some day soon.:)
    His condition gets better every day, especially as regards mental acuity. The only thing that concerns me a little is that he now speaks with a lazy S, which I don't recall him ever doing before. He's on several medications that he hadn't been taking before. Hopefully he'll be able to stop one or more of those. With luck, the speech patterns will clear up either with that or with the passage of time. But of course if he walks again and also has a lazy S, we'll live with it. It isn't much of an impediment; he is readily understandable.

Two steps forward

    Two steps forward and one step back is still progress. (Also, not a Paula Abdul/ MC Skat Kat reference.) Dad had difficulties yesterday, as his blood pressure was too high in the morning for physical therapy. They gave him medication three different times (two different medications) to bring it down. I have raved in the past and will rave in the future that I'd strongly prefer it if American medicine would investigate causes rather than just issue a pill for every problem. However, in this instance, the medications did eventually at least partially lower his blood pressure.
    So we were present for an attempt at physical therapy. Unfortunately, that didn't go so well. He could only stand up and uh, lost control of bodily functions. So no physical therapy went on yesterday. They probably should have thought that through a little better.
    However, brother Malcolm Jr., who has spent far more time with Dad than the rest of us, says he's doing much, much better. Talking better, thinking more clearly, eating for himself and pulling himself up in the bed when he needs to. So progress is happening, if a little slower than we might wish. And he's moving to the rehab floor at Baptist today, as he wishes. He doesn't have to move to HealthSouth. Yay! (He doesn't have anything against HealthSouth; it's just that Margaret rehabbed at Baptist after her hip replacement and the rehab went well. We will hope for the same.)