Home at Last

MLW, the mini-BG and I spent Sunday at my mom and stepfather's (in a potty-training test of wills, but that's a post for another time) and then I stayed the night while the wife and child went back home.

After being transferred, the expectation was that my stepfather would be going under the knife early on Monday afternoon. When Monday morning rolled around, this time got pushed to later on Monday afternoon--and then he was pushed to Tuesday. Turns out an emergency case had come in, which had to take precedence. While completely understandable, the patient was getting a wee bit antsy. In a classy move, the hospital gave him and my mom a special dinner for two: surf 'n' turf. Unbelievably, some hospitals have recognized that their food service was, if you can imagine it, not quite yummy, and have even more incredibly decided to actually upgrade their culinary experience.

So Tuesday rolls around, he's dosed up on morphine and taken into surgery, while my mother, aunt, uncle and I get to...wait. And wait. And wait.

The operation was, from what the surgeon described, pretty much textbook. They needed to do four bypasses, but they had no issues harvesting the veins or attaching them. When we were brought in to see him, I pretty much knew what to expect, having had to watch the mini-BG go through it. He actually looked better than she did, partly because he was almost completely covered by blankets. He was intubated, and had a number of IV leads and a tube in his chest to drain fluid, but he looked pretty darn good, all things considered. The nurses still had some work to do on him, so we left the hospital and I went home. When I got there, it felt like I had been away forever.

Yesterday, he regained consciousness and they removed some of the leads and tubes, including the one down his throat. He was, as we expected, cranky as hell, and stated flat out that he wanted no visitors for the next day or so in order to get more sleep. He has stated his intention to be home by Saturday--more power to him.

The kicker to this entire experience was the fact that my stepdad had a pretty low risk factor for heart problems: his cholesterol was low and he had regular stress tests and EKGs. What he also had, as my mother discovered, was a family history of heart trouble. Had he not been smart and gone to the hospital when he first start having chest pains, the outcome of this ordeal would have been much worse.