Houston, the duck hunter has landed!

Dad was planning on coming home yesterday, but alas, his heart had other plans. The nurse took him for a walk down the hall and they hadn’t gone very fair before they were intercepted: “Are you Mr. Bakken?” He had some sensors glued to his chest, they were monitoring his vitals at the nurses’ station and his heart was beating a lot faster than it should have been. And it happened again several times during the day.

The doctors weren’t really surprised: a lot of people suffer from atrial fibrillation just after heart surgery. Essentially, one chamber of the heart is like, “Hey, let’s race!” And the others are like, “Screw you, I’m sticking with the current heart rate.” And the one is like, “Screw you, I’m gonna race anyway!” As you would imagine, when your heart rate is 80 beats per minute and one chamber suddenly jacks up to 160, your blood doesn’t flow nearly as well as it should.

So they kept Dad at the hospital for another night, time for more testing and more rehab sessions and more hospital food. Since they knew his problem was a-fib, it meant one more medication for the next four weeks. There are a lot of medications he’s taking for the next four weeks. After that, he’ll get to revisit the doctors. Some of the problems might be gone by then.

He’ll be getting antibiotic infusions again—the surgeons didn’t think that spot on his valve was a bacterial infection, but we don’t want to take any chances. He’s taking medication for the a-fib, but his heart might correct itself naturally. There are a lot of things we simply don’t know at this point. After pumping him full of various meds for four weeks, we should have a few more answers and be able to make adjustments from there.

He signed his release papers a couple hours after I got there, at which point we grabbed his stuff and walked out the door of his room. They were calling a wheelchair to bring him out, but he was walking anyway. I saw the guy with the wheelchair first, so I told him Dad was trying to escape before I headed out to get my car.

I pulled up next to the building, put Dad in the back seat and headed out to the highway. (In case you’re wondering why he was in the back, it’s because if he’s in front and the air bag goes off… that’s bad for a surgically-repaired sternum.) He was glad to be out. He spent a majority of three weeks in a hospital bed and that was more than enough. As I was driving us home, I agreed: that was more than enough.