Recovery!

I'm going to tell this story in order, but I want to preface this with the note that my dad is making a full recovery. He might even be completely out of the hospital by this coming Saturday (fingers crossed!)

On Friday morning, my mom called with the message that I should come down. She told me that things were going south fast, and that the time to visit was now. I was so unprepared for "the call" I was beside myself. I only delayed going about an hour or so -- long enough to pack and to stop to get Shawn and Mason ready for an extended absence (ie a quick drop off for them at a used bookstore while I ran to the grocery store for food Shawn could make easily.)

I cried nearly the entire drive down. I was especially freaked out when I saw a flock of trumpeter swans circling the marshland, because there was something about white wings in the air that just called to mind death.

When I got there, Mom told me that they were preparing my dad for a risky procedure, which involved attempting to revive his failing kidneys by draining off the fluid. He had three doctors on his team in the ICU and the procedure was so dangerous that one of them voted against it. But, at that point it really seemed like my mom's choices were take the risk or watch him slowly decline.

I gave him a kiss and told him I loved him before they wheeled him away, and my mom, my aunt and I spent the next hour keeping ourselves company while trying not to think about the fact we might not see him alive again. When the doctor came back without him, we nearly all had heart attacks but the news was good. The procedure went according to plan and now it was just a matter of watching to see if he made it through the night.

When it seemed as though things were going okay, I talked my mom into going home and trying to get some decent rest. I stayed. It was one of the longest nights of my life. At points, my dad was awake and we talked, but at others, when he was drifting in and out of consciousness, I talked to myself or thought a lot of hard, intense thoughts. When my dad finally fell into a restful sleep around two in the morning, I followed suit. But we were both up by six, as they had other tests they wanted to perform -- one of the complications involved the fact that the sepis triggered a number of here-to-for undiscovered conditions. Also it took going into the kidney to perform the scary procedure for the doctors to figure out that the sepis was probably caused by a kidney stone that my dad somehow never felt (which they still need to remove, but they're waiting until he's at full strength.)

At any rate, after that night things began to steadily improve. I decided it was okay to leave the bedside some time around Sunday afternoon, even though he was still in the ICU/CCU (Critical Care Unit). He had made such vast improvements, we kind of became the "fun" room, in that the nurses would sit in our room to do their "paperwork" on the computer. Mom and I kept a steady stream of the kind of conversation that we'd normally have while sitting on the front three-season porch at home. My dad would perk up enough to throw in his observations or comments before drifting back to sleep. That probably still sounds pretty awful, but the difference was astounding. He was hungry and eating food, and starting to complain about how irritating it was to be stuck in bed. When I heard from my mom on Monday that he was asking for his laptop, I knew he was very, VERY likely to be okay.

My dad is in the middle of revising a book of his own, though his is non-fiction and probably has something to do with qualitative research, psychology or any of his other areas of interst. Anyway, the fact that he was ready to get back to work is truly heartening.

In the meantime, I've been trying to get back to my own life a little. I helped my martial arts studio move house a little yesterday, which was great fun, actually. My muscles are sore from the lifting and whatnot, but I got to see a video of my head instructor in his college days (with hair!) in which he battled a pipecleaner (stop-motion art project type thing). It was AWESOME.

At any rate, now I have to decide what to work on. Probably, I should figure out how to write the cow mutilation story that Penguin bought. :-)