My and my father’s hellish week…
My grandma is 100 years old. Pretty amazing huh? My father is 77 years old and just had cataract surgery which ended up with him getting a major eye infection, and he also had a stent put in his right coronary artery a little over a month ago. In addition to that, he also has diabetes which wasn’t treated for years after he first found out that he had it because he was too stubborn to believe them. Now when he had his stent put in, he finally believed them and started treating it. He also has a really hard time walking because of a bad lower back and hip, and has to walk with a cane. He also can’t walk long distances because it hurts his back and hip a lot.
Now, my grandma just recently got put into an assisted care facility because my dad’s sister couldn’t really take care of her anymore. She needs more attention than my aunt can provide at this point. Well while in the facility, she has fallen a few times, has a hairline fracture, and has been hospitalized for fluid around her heart and lungs and shortness of breath. She’s also not too mentally with it anymore, so my father wanted to get down to California to see her because it might be the last chance he gets. That’s where I come in…
I don’t work outside the home, so I was the natural choice to drive him down there. I would have preferred to have flown down, but my father hates flying because of a bad experience he had coming home from Korea after the war, so we loaded up the truck and headed on down.
I left my house at 6am Monday morning and started my hour long drive to get to my parent’s house. I took my guitar, my pocket pod and one of my favorite books along with me to keep myself busy while my father was visiting my grandma, along with about six days worth of clothes even though we were only supposed to be gone for four days.
So I head out, and the first thing I realize about a half hour down the road is that I forgot my sunglasses. Well shit… I guess that was a bit of foreshadowing as to how things were going to go right there. Still, I didn’t feel like going back to get them, so I just continued on and figured I’d buy another pair if I needed them along the way.
So I get to my parent’s house, and after a good breakfast, we loaded up the truck and off we went.
Now the trip between Boise, Idaho and Vacaville, California is basically ranges from mile after mile of absolutely nothing but barren landscape littered with weedy shrubs and the occasional cow or two to high desert to mountainous areas. Interspersed in between are the occasional small to mid-sized town, and then Reno, Nevada, and then nothing more really of any note until you get to Sacramento, California. The drive was basically about eleven and a half hours long from my parent’s house until we reached our destination. The benefit to having mile after mile of straight roads though is that we were able to fly through it all at 70mph – 85mph, and sometimes even higher speeds.
When we stopped in Winnemucca to have lunch, I called my mom from there to let her know how things were going. She told me on the phone that my dad’s brother had called her and told her that my grandma had had a massive heart attack and was in the hospital again. From that point on I literally flew down there as fast as I could, only stopping for a few minutes here and there for bathroom breaks and to stretch our legs. I wanted to get my father there as soon as possible.
I managed to avoid all the cops on the way down, and eventually, around 6:40pm or so we got into Vacaville and checked into our hotel. Basically all we did was unload our stuff and then headed right over to the hospital to see grandma. We were told the hospital was right across from her assisted care facility, but when we got there, the building next to it turned out to be nothing but a bunch of doctor’s offices and such. We asked at the facility and they gave me directions to the hospital.
So we get over there and go up to see her, and we were told she was in room 2119 or something like that. Then we come to find out they moved her to a different room and didn’t even update it in the system. Anyway, we finally found out her actual room number and headed over. We get in there and come to find out that she didn’t have a heart attack at all. She just had some shortness of breath, so they brought her in and stabilized her and had all kinds of tubes stuck in her and sensor pads stuck all over her. She was awake and alert though, and we sat and talked to her for an hour or so before we headed back to the hotel thinking we’d be back the next day to see her again. Things didn’t work out that way though…
I was literally exhausted, and by that night I had gone for about two and a half days on about three hours of sleep. So needless to say, after we got settled in and had some dinner, we both crashed. That’s when things turned insanely bad… It was at this point that I very literally saved my father’s life.
About 3:20am or so on Tuesday morning, my father managed to wake me up. He had fallen, and somehow managed to get himself back up onto his bed after and indeterminate amount of time. He doesn’t actually remember anything about it, but just remembers that he fell and somehow managed to get back up onto the bed. He tried to wake me but I was so dead that I didn’t wake up right away. Finally he called my name a few more times and I woke up to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, drenched in sweat, extremely short of breath, totally out of it and basically just really messed up. I asked him what was wrong and he was barely responsive. I was thinking at first that he might have eaten the wrong crap at dinner and ended up with a spiked up blood sugar. He was telling me that he needed some juice or some hard candy, also thinking he was having some kind of a reaction. I told him that was only for if he got too much insulin, which he isn’t even taking. He’s on a pill called metformin for his diabetes. Anyway, I quickly realized that it was something more serious, so I got some clothes on him and threw on my pants and shoes and got him out to the truck as quickly as I could.
I drove him as fast as I could over to the emergency room of the hospital my grandma was in. It was lucky that we had gone over there earlier, so I actually knew where it was and that I could get there quickly. We pulled up and I went in and got him a wheelchair and got him in it. I took him in and in no time he had about seven or eight people working on him. They hooked him up to all kinds of tubes and sensors and what not, and found out that his heart was in a rhythm called ventricular tachycardia (or v-tach as they call it on the hip television hospital shows). They stuck a couple of defibrillator pads on him and shocked him…hard. He damn near jumped out of the bed when they juiced him. His heart went back into a normal sinus rhythm after that and he stabilized and became more alert. The cardiologist that treated him later told me that they get one of those about every month or two and that most people who get that don’t survive it unless they get immediate treatment, and even then they don’t survive all the time. Anyway, they continued to treat him and took care of him, and eventually after he was stabilized and settled, I finally went back to the hotel and got some sleep, because by that time I had been running for about three plus days on just a few hours of sleep and I was just flat out exhausted.
I went back later on and sat with him, and over the course of the week, his brother and two sisters had been around and visiting a lot with him and his mother both. They never did tell my grandma what happened to him. They just told her he had an emergency and had to go home. Anyway, his sister Arlene came in to see him on Tuesday when I was there. She’s really nice and she stayed around for a while, but then we didn’t see her again before we left to come home. His sister Margy and his brother Jack came down and stayed in the same hotel I was in and stuck around until the day we went home. I spent a lot of time with my uncle over the past week because of this. He’s a really good guy and helped out a lot.
I needed to go home that afternoon to get some more sleep because I was still pretty dead, so I told my dad if I didn’t wake up until it was too late, that I’d see him in the morning. Well it turns out that I actually woke up at 7pm, so by 7:30 I was back in the hospital to see him. He wasn’t there though. He had been transferred to a hospital in Fairfield, which was just a bit down the freeway from Vacaville, where they were going to do the surgery on him the following day. Since I didn’t know how to get there, I waited until the following day and followed my uncle over there so I’d know how to get there and back.
The surgery they did on my father was actually two procedures. The first was a cath procedure where they went up through his leg and looked around his heart to see if they could spot any reason for this to have happened, and also to look at his stent to see if it had collapsed or developed any other problems. Other than a bit of diminished heart function, they didn’t really find any problems. The other thing they did was to implant a defibrillator device into his chest. Basically it’s a box that is implanted under the skin on the chest between the fat layer and the pectoral muscle. It has wires that run over through his arm and then down into his heart. If this ever happens again, the device will detect it and hit him with something like 860 volts / 32 joules, which apparently is an extremely hard hit of voltage, and it should knock his heart back into a normal rhythm. It’s like an insurance policy against this happening again and killing him should he not be able to get to help in time.
After the procedure he was extremely unresponsive, confused, and just generally unclear. It turns out, they had to actually put him out for a few minutes during the procedure because he was moving his arms around and stuff. Usually they don’t put you fully out for what he had done, but in this case they had to to stop him from moving around. Anyway, the lack of clarity was due to the anesthetic they used and lasted for a couple of days after the procedure. We were really worried about him because of that and they did a CT scan on his head and an ultrasound on his neck to make sure everything was ok, in case it was something aside from the anesthetic, but it all came back fine. He had a catheter inserted so he could urinate whenever, and there was a lot of blood in his urine, which was kind of scary and could have meant a kidney infection, but they tested that as well and it was fine. The blood apparently was just from the catheter being in there.
The doctors and the nursing staff at both hospitals were all just wonderful and they took really good care of him. I just wanted to mention that. We were in a completely different state, away from everything, and they were really great about everything.
Anyway, so it came down to Friday, and we were still not sure how long it would be until he was released. We had already decided that he was going to have to fly home so that he wouldn’t have to make that hellish drive again. It was decided later though that he couldn’t fly home alone, so my mom had my wife Sharon arrange to get us each a ticket and I flew back with him. Unfortunately, we still had the truck there, so we also had to have my sister fly down so she could drive the truck back home while I flew with my dad. We got home yesterday.
There were some other nasty things that happened on Thursday night and basically I didn’t get any sleep that night because I was up all night helping my father, but I won’t get into all that. There were some other notable things that happened during this trip as well, but they were just kinda side things. The long and the short of it is…both my father and I just had an unbelievably horrid week, and after all that we went through, we spent six days down there and only saw my grandma for a total of about one hour. Now I’m home and basically trying to recover from everything that I’ve been through, which means lots of sleeping and generally relaxing. My father is home now, and I’m sure he’s doing the same. I’m just glad I was with him when this happened so I could help him, and I’m REALLY glad that this didn’t happen on the drive down there where we were stuck on the road with mile after mile of absolutely nothing around us and no way to get him any help. Hell, even at home he’s miles away from any help. If this was going to happen, it couldn’t have happened in a better place or at a better time, since I was able to quickly get him the help he needed to save his life. I think about how close we were to losing him and it just makes me…well…scared. I love my father and seeing him have to go through so many bad medical things all the time really hurts me. He’s been nothing but great my whole life. He’s always been there for me, and I’ll always do whatever I can to be there for him now that he’s in this time of his life where he’s the one who needs help. I just hope this is the end of his medical problems for a while. He’s been through more than enough for any ten people.
So that’s it. For anyone who’s written to me in the last week, I’ll try to get caught up on responding to stuff soon. Right now I’m just trying to settle back into my normal life and get rested up.
(Current Mood: tired
) 