>Somehow still trading sibling text snipes consequent to my frustration last night — is this trip really neccessary? I should’a knowed better but I had promised to make the offer. 😦
Did find a kewl comic strip: Mythtickle. Hey, anyone who gets Ra, Set and Horus on the funny pages and draws the latter as a hulking, annoyed budgie is worth a look!
>Day Three or Four (day two in a row, the cold having put a stop to my efforts for a week) of Ride A Mile Every Evening. The temperature has been in the low-mid 40s, which sounds pretty chilly but once you get the bike up to a decent turn of speed, you’re generating plenty of heat.
Once I can do the mile in top gear, I’ll start increasing the distance. I’ve got a ways to go before I get back to where I was last summer; I knew I should have set up the stationary bicycle kit this winter but I kept finding excuses not to.
Still getting over my cold, too, but hey, ten minutes or so of deep-breathing exercises have to be going more good than harm, right?
>Haven’t a thing to blog about, really. Or at least no one big thing.
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I went to see Mom last night and she looked and acted hugely better, very much her old self. One of her meds seems to have been most of the trouble; recovering from heart surgery is tough enough already without that! Looks like she’ll be in hospital for a day or two, then back to rehab and able to really rehabilitate this time!
Tam drove, with her new GPS navagating. Or nagging, with Tam telling it to give proper directions or shut up. (It was occasionally determined to make her drive directly away from our destination and kept calling for a 180 on the freeway.)
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The TV is still milking the Tucson outrage for sobs, concentrating on victims relatives who will parrot the “guns’re baaaad” meme. –Yes, so bad that they’d give anything for there to had been a policeman, security guard or other armed, skilled individual on the scene from the get-go; the only problem these ninnies have is that they don’t trust their fellow-citizens to go armed unless they are creatures of the State — or least wearing a spiffy uniform.
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Locally, it appears a fellow out to steal copper tried to steal a live power drop about 3:30 this morning. I guess if I was truly soft-hearted I’d feel bad for him but sheesh: say Hi to Mr. Darwin for me! Bonus: most power drops (at least around here) use aluminum wire.
One of the local FMs went off the air on a hot afternoon last summer and when staffers arrived at the site, all of the air-conditioner plumbing had been hacked out and stolen. Meanwhile, the fat, plastic-jacketed Heliax copper coax, 3″ or 4″ OD? Intact! Almost a pity, as there are a number of ways to check out trying to steal that stuff, none of them nice.
>I’m sitting here in Room [redacted] of [redacted] Heart Hospital, to which Mom has returned from the rehab center. Seems her cardiologist thought her heart should have a more danceable rhythm and he wanted (additional) professional help. Plus he wanted to do some fancy imaging of the kind they keep the big machines for in hospitals
Naturally, by the time he reached this conclusion, the sun was over the yardarm and by the time Mom had been transported over and every last form had been filled out (in ink! In triplicate! Sign here, and let’s see your card again…) , it was late afternoon. All the imaging pixies and cardioversionologolites had already packed it in for the day.
Probably just as well; these things go better after a good night’s sleep. Which I hope she’s getting. She’s a light sleeper and is drifting in and out of dreamland now. I’ll stay as late as I can and perhaps she’ll get some decent zzz’s.
She snores way better than I do. (I occasionally receive nasty notes from seismologists).
>My phone started making the text-message “ding!” about 0500: Inattentive Rehab, Inc. had sent Mom to the nearest hospital (about a block away).
Nope, she hadn’t slugged her roommate or arranged to have the TV go out the window; her heart rate had gone way up!
So they get her to St. Nearby, where the docs check her out and decide A) she will be staying until the weather is better and B) elevated heart rate was anxiety. Slowed right down once she was in a place with sufficient staff — or at least staff sufficiently involved in the job.
You’d’ve been anxious, too. The issues I mentioned earlier and called the place about? They’d just shined me on and done nothing at all. Just as they did when my sister called before me and my brother called after. You don’t do this; you do not ignore a patient who cannot even get out of bed unaided. That’s way past the loud TV or too-hot room.
When my brother arrived at St. Nearby Hospital, Mom’s asked him to find a different place for rehab.
There is another inpatient rehab place not too far away and my siblings and I will be checking it out very carefully. We may have to take shifts being there, just to keep ’em honest.
For now, Mom’s in good hands.
>I managed to drive home, 25 mph max through ice pellets like sand. No, more like kitty litter. Which beats freezing rain or even wet snow, but it’s strange and treacherous, heaped and drifted, slowly solidifying on the side roads. Still, so much better than a coating of ice — of which we did get a little earlier in the day. As long as it stays good and cold overnight, things might not be too bad. Might. Of course, the meteorologists of DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! promise a bit more of the same tomorrow.
They moved Mom to a rehab hospital today; I was stuck at work, a dozen miles away. 😦 Gonna call her next; she may be asleep. It was a lot of effort for her.
Update: So I call her. Mom X is not what you’d call a complainer; oh, given the right circumstances, she’ll sigh and barely-tolerate annoying things in a way the clearly indicates This Is Wrong, but that’s pretty typical Mom-ing. When it counts, she’s a trouper.
…She picks up and there is a TV blaring; Mom asks, “Can you hear that?”
Yeah.
“I can’t turn it down. I can’t get my roommate to turn it down. I think she’s asleep. The nurses are no help.”
That’s lousy, Mom.
“And it’s like 85 in here. Plus I’ve been waiting for over a half-hour to get someone to answer the call button…”
(Bear in mind that at this point, she’s still not walking without major help; so they really had ought not be ignoring that little help-me light unless there’s huge major badness elsewhere).
You want me to come up there? No? Well, I’m callin’ ’em.
I called ’em. Got the Chief Nurse in charge, who implied Mom’s roomie was…problematic. She promised to Take Action and said she’d try to get one or other moved.
I’ll be following up. Do they really want me riled at ’em? I can think of a whole lot of reasons why they shouldn’t. I’m real persistent. Oh yeah. Plus I’ll sic Tam on them.
>Saw my Mother this morning. She’s awake, off the ventilator, off most of the IVs and even out of her bed…at least as far as a recliner. She counts it as big progress (between naps) and so do I.
>We did go up and see Mom; she was on a ventilator, still under and had an impressive collection of IVs. Her day-shift nurse is one of the impressively fit, hyper-competent young men one encounters (sometimes) in nursing, the sort of guy that had the balance tilted a bit away from nurturing instead of towards it might have been a policeman or a Marine.
Word was she’d be vent-tubed and out of it for a long time, so I stayed awhile, went home, ate, laid down “for just a minute” and slept for five hours.
I’ll go back up in the early morning.
>Sitting in one of the conferring rooms waiting for the surgeon to finish dictating his Serious Medical Notes.
Updates to follow in this post.
Update: One valve replaced, one bypass. No transfusions (yet). Aortic valve was “good enough.” No surprises, he says! –We’ll be able to see her in an hour or so. Medical Niece says we could not have asked for better news.
Update 2: 1:10 pm. Anesthesiologist is talking with us, says she is in her room now and doing well. On a vent and getting the usual “interesting” brew of post-operative meds. Not conscious yet and still on a ventilator.
Dr. Sleepytime left and the Chaplain took over for him. She’s telling us we might be able to visit Mom in twenty minutes or so.
>Chaplain came out with an update while I was getting coffee: the work is done and Mom’s successfully off the heart-lung machine.
Surgeon is closing and will be out in an hour or so to give us the lay-language debriefing.
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In other news, the “Starbucks” coffee at St. Vincent’s Heart Hospital borders on undrinkable. I got 2/3 of a cup and topped it up with half-and-half; this produces merely double-strength coffee, almost like what you’d get at a regular drive-by Starbucks. So what gives, does just any outfit who will fork over the bucks and buy their beans get to sell whatever they brew as “Starbucks?” Cle-ver. I’d thought they at least had the virtue of consistency.
Lacking that, gimme a restaurant-grade Bunn kept clean and bought-in-bulk generic ground coffee, please. At least it won’t eat through the cup. It’s good enough for the Navy!
The Adventures Of Roberta X 