Tuesday, October 10, 2006

The Fall

We woke at 4:00 in the morning to get dressed and drive to the hospital. Not much to say. I sucked on a cup of coffee; he had to be satisfied with the smell.

They took away his clothes and started an IV at 7:30; told me to move the car to the other side of the hospital and wait in the waiting room. Hours to spend studying up on partnerships that have partnerships as partners and contemplating the posibility of fomites while flipping through months-old copies of Better Homes and Gardens and The Economist, US News and World Report, donated by the medical staff, their names blacked out, all the while forced to endure Judge Hudy and Dudy feigning astonishment at the antics of their plaintiffs and defendants-- women trying to find out who the real fathers of their six-year-old children are. Listening to the unending litany of atrocities-- a mother using her baby to beatup her boyfriend (who was also the presumptive father). The baby suffered a fractured skull. The mother sobbed that she didn't mean to hurt her child. The father explained that she was drunk and got mad and started throwing things at him-- a lamp, table, a dish... then she grabbed their baby and started whaling away on him. Never thought of a child as a weapon.

But I digress.

The waiting room was tastefully decorated, without the slightest consideration of comfort. Might as well have installed wooden pews.

Meanwhile, they cut him open and installed a titanium cylinder, about 1/2" in diameter and two inches long to take the place of a gelatinous disk that had flattened and oozed out of where it was supposed to be, and used a piece of bone from his vertebrae where they had drilled holes for the nuts and bolts to make it all fit together nicely.

Around 11:00, a nurse called the phone in the waiting room and said that the surgery was finished, and he was heading to recovery.

Around twelve, the Syrian strode in and said he'd done well. He looked tired. It's probably easier to do what he did to littler people.

I got some lunch in the hospital cafeteria and read some more on partnerships, then continued on in Stiff, a delightful romp through the boneyards and mortuaries, plastic surgery training camps and cadaver schools.

Back in the waiting room, wondering what was taking so long. Went to the nurses station and inquired. "Oh, they're having a hard time getting his pain under control after he emerged from the anesthesia-- shouldn't be too much longer-- 20 or 30 minutes.

An hour-and-a-half later, they finally rolled him into the room. He was not feeling too well, and was hooked up to a morphine pump. I suggested that maybe he should take a couple of extra hits and see if he couldn't dull the pain some. So he did. His pupils shrank to pin pricks and he started talking out of his head. He started to feel a bit nauseated, so the nurse (a young one) ran off to get an ampul of phenergan. As she was injecting it into his IV, I remarked that phenergan always pretty much knocked me out. She got a funny look on her face as she clearly remembered some warning about giving these two drugs at the same time. Meaniwhile, as expected, he became semi-comatose and started doing his usual apnea-snoring routine, only with a vengence-- not breathing and then ripping and snorting. His oxygen monitor started going off, and the nurse took off to find someone to consult. She suggested giving him Narcan to counteract the effects of the overdose of CNS suppressants, but the other nurse said "Naw, you don't want him waking up screaming in pain in the middle of the night-- but we probably ought to take away his glowing green button for a while, so he can't pump any more morphine in his system."

It was bedtime, and I had an hour to drive, so I went on home, having determined earlier in the afternoon that the recliner was actually an inverse gravitation device. The footrest would not open without the head of the chair resting on the floor.

The cats and dogs were relieved that someone had returned and settled in to meowing and barking. The meowing quit as soon as I settled into bed, but Lu felt some need to bark every twenty seconds or so at the full moon. Twenty seconds is every so much more annoying than a steady barking, so I got up and thoroughly cussed her out, which was apparently all she wanted.

And at 4:00 I got up and cleaned out the cat boxes, fed & watered the animals and drove back to the hospital.

To be continued...

Tonight, the internist came in and told us that he had a small bloodclot in his lungs and that the vascular surgeon wanted to install a filter (like a little umbrella that opens up in his artery or vein or somewhere) in his femoral artery. Phooey on that. Cutting him again will cause more blood clots, to say nothing of misery. And the surgeon overruled them putting him on blood thinners.

**sigh**.

Going to sleep... now......




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