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There’s no place like home

From mid-November until today, Dad has spent 42 days in the hospital. Six weeks. Six weeks over the course of two months.

Until today. After so many visits to Southdale Hospital (the drive is about twenty minutes if traffic is good), Mom and I finally had an additional passenger on our way home. Dad is finally back. He’s finally back home.

From the garage, he went straight up the stairs. Not both feet on each step; he went straight up. He sat down long enough for us to get his shoes off (he still has enough fluid in his system that he can’t reach down to put on shoes and socks by himself), then walked to a chair next to the picture window on the north side of the house.

His view in his hospital room consisted primarily of the roof of the building next to his, a crane and a nearby highway. From the picture window, you can see Orchard Lake, Orchard Lake Park, lots of trees and drifting snow and people walking their pets… a lot of stuff that’s not hospital-related.

We’re sending out a mass email to family and friends that goes out to four lists an hour apart. If we clump everyone’s email addresses into one message, Frontier thinks it’s spam and won’t send it. The lists are that long.

In it, Dad thanks everyone for their support, their prayers, their gifts, phone calls, emails and personal visits. Without it, those six weeks in the hospital would have been much more difficult to endure.

Now we can rest for a while and get used to regular life again. A life where he can sleep flat on a bed. A life that doesn’t include visits from nurses at all hours of the day and night. A life of knowing what day of the week it is. A life of stairs and haircuts and showers and looking out the window at more than just another hospital roof. Regular life at home.

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Dad doesn’t do The Twitter

I know, I know, I’ve been neglecting the blog again. That’s in part because Dad’s in the hospital again. He’s been in and out for a total of about 30 days since mid-November. As you can imagine, he’s getting tired of the place.

They readmitted Dad most recently because he wasn’t getting better since he left. He was still having trouble breathing, he was still retaining a lot of fluid, he was still in a-fib. The doctors thought that some of it would get better on its own; it didn’t. We waited for almost two weeks, which was really longer than we should have. When someone gets to the top of a long staircase and has to take a five-minute break to catch his breath… he didn’t want to go back, but knew he had to.

Among all of the other stuff they were pumping into Dad’s body, one was a medication that would hopefully get his heart back in sync. It was still beating way too fast and way too ineffectively. The heart normally works at about 50% efficiency, whereas Dad’s was somewhere in the 35-40% range. Much like other medications, this stuff didn’t work well enough, so they had to resort to cardioversion.

Basically, they put an electrode on his chest, one on his back and send a mild electric pulse through his body to shock his heart back into rhythm. When it was time to get him hooked up, Mom and I went to the visitors’ lounge to wait. Twenty minutes later, a doctor came in to tell us they were done. We walked into the room, I looked at the machine showing his heart rate and it had dropped from 99 to 69.

So now Dad is going for longer walks through the hospital and isn’t getting as winded as before, but he’s still retaining a lot of fluid. Not as much, but still a lot. Consequently, he’s still at the hospital and getting bored out of his mind. Go figure. He doesn’t like watching TV, he’s not a big reader, so most of what he does is sit around. He gets to talk to the occasional visitor and the nursing staff when they’re in the room, but there’s still a lot of sitting and not doing much.

A couple days ago, Mom and I were walking back to his room with him and a physical therapist. We were talking about things that might keep him busy and the therapist suggested getting him a Twitter account. I thought that would be a fun idea, but he was stuck in the hospital. What would he tweet about? So a few minutes later, I started thinking of some things and sent them out via my own Twitter account:

We just thought about getting my dad a Twitter account to keep him busy in the hospital, but what would he write?
Day 11: Still chillin’ in my recliner.
Thank God I have a toilet in my room, these new diuretics don’t give me much warning before I have to pee!
I’m the mayor of the Cardiac Rehab Unit on Foursquare!
Chillin’ in my recliner AGAIN.
Just got a sponge bath. Life is good.
Why does the food here taste so nasty?!?! Oh, wait, that’s right, it’s hospital food.
I’d kill for a nurse’s pair of scrubs right now. It’s way too breezy downstairs when I stand up.
I think my butt is starting to conform to the shape of my recliner seat.
If I was the big bad wolf, I’d huff and I’d puff and then I’d have to sit down to catch my breath.
#whatdohashtagsdo?
I love my wife very much. No, she didn’t steal my phone to pretend I wrote that. Thanks for being here for me.
Do I get a sticker for hitting the 2-liter mark for peeing today? This new diuretic is REALLY working.
Ok, so maybe there ARE a lot of things Dad could tweet if he felt so inspired…

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Can I borrow Tiny Tim’s crutch?

About a month ago, I wrote about how I sprained my left foot during rehearsal for Scrooge. At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was my foot or my ankle. Then I was sitting in Dad’s room in the hospital last week just kinda shifting my feet around on the floor and I felt a pretty sharp pain on both sides right at the arch. Yep, there’s definitely something wrong with my foot.

It’s been a few weeks since we finished Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations, so I’ve only had rehearsals on Saturdays for… God knows how many hours. (Today, we ran both acts twice and had a lunch break that lasted close to an hour. We started at 9:00 and finished about 4:45. That’s a lot of singing and dancing and I’m pooped.) But still, you’d think that having so much time off during each week would give my foot plenty of time to heal. That’s what I was thinking, but nope! Still hurts!

My foot is the problem area, but when I went looking at braces and wraps at sporting goods stores, all they had were for ankles. Some of them reached halfway up the shin down to near the ball of the foot, but they didn’t look like they provided much support for the arch. Thus, I headed to a store I could trust: Fleet Farm. Then I headed to the area of the store that had what I was looking for: the equine section.

In the midst of all the horse brushes and kettlebells for horses to hold in their mouths to exercise their necks (no, I’m not kidding), Fleet Farm sells a product called Vetrap. It’s good stuff. It’s basically a self-adhesive Ace bandage. Wrap it snug around something (like, say, the arch of your foot), squish it together and it’ll stay in place. Since all of it adheres to itself, it doesn’t move around, which is good for support and bad when you’re trying to take it off afterward. (You either have to find the end and peel it all off or just cut it with a scissors, which is way easier.)

I had some at home, so I used that today along with my ankle brace for safety and it worked pretty well. That didn’t save my feet as a whole since today was the first time I wore my new dance shoes for an extended period of time, let alone danced in them. But the arch and the outsides of my foot felt okay, so I decided I should go with that instead of buying a thirty dollar ankle brace (no, I’m not kidding about that, either) that might or might not help.

The only downside of the Vetrap I had was that it was purple. At some point during the first run of Act II today, I looked down and saw a very large blotch of purple on my foot. I was starting to freak out until I realized that the tongue of the shoe was sliding down the outside and I was looking at the top of my foot. Whew.

As much as I like purple, I don’t think it’d fit the color scheme for my costume. Thankfully, Fleet Farm sells black Vetrap. Not so thankfully, that section of the shelf was completely empty. Every single color was available except black. Shit.

I decided that my best second option was a dark blue: it shouldn’t look nearly as bright as red or pink under the lights. Or purple, for that matter. I’ll have to check my shoes once in a while, make sure the tongue isn’t sliding around, but I prefer that over going without any support and making my sprained foot worse. After all, walking like a cripple onstage is Tiny Tim’s job.

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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.

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The Stare of the Roto-Rooter Man

The drain pipe going out of our laundry tub is plugged. And I mean plugged. The last time I did a full load of laundry, I came downstairs just in time to hear water spilling out over the top. We decided to buy a gallon-sized jug of Draino and applied it in various amounts for various periods of time: when it doesn’t work the first time, add more and let it sit longer. Turn on water, watch it back up and start filling the tub in about thirty seconds, repeat.

So we finally called Roto-Rooter. (As much as I enjoy not washing my clothes for weeks at a time, it shouldn’t reach the point where they’re capable of escaping from the laundry hamper under their own power.) The guy came to the house today, looked at some paperwork and revealed that they were here in 2002 for the same problem. Eleven years is plenty of time for a significant amount of goo to collect in a drain pipe, so it’s not like they did a poor job.

In fact, they may have done a better job than we thought. When he mentioned the visit in ’02, Mom told me that we took a picture of the previous Roto-Rooter guy. Why? To make sure it wouldn’t back up again. How? We put the picture on the side of the washing machine so he maintained a constant threatening presence next to the drain pipe.

It worked for over a decade. While this new guy was fixing the pipes, Mom brought up the old picture that had been on the washing machine. The caption read, “I’m Watching You!” The picture… well, it was starting to look like that melty-face dude from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not as threatening anymore, which is probably why the drain had the proverbial balls to start backing up again.

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All things considered, Dad’s doing okay.

Some of you have heard about this through my friends and family; some haven’t and thus have no idea what the title of this blog entry entails. The short, short version? Dad had open-heart surgery on Thursday and seems to be recovering nicely. (I hear that generic orange popsicles are “the best popsicles ever” when they’re the first thing you eat after surgery.)

The longer story about Dad’s heart goes back about six years. First off, he’s a mutant. Seriously. He has a genetic mutation that resulted in his being born with a bicuspid aortic valve (vs. most people’s tricuspid valve). That never kept him from being active and playing sports better than his friends as they got older (probably not a result of his being a mutant, but you never know…).

Back in November ’07, Dad had a heart attack and needed double-bypass surgery, so they replaced his aortic valve at the same time. If I remember right, it was leaking a little bit at the time, but not enough to do anything drastic. Still, since they were already performing open-heart surgery—the blockages were in places where the doctors couldn’t just use a stint—they found a piggy that may or may not have volunteered to have its own aortic valve put into Dad’s chest. Thus, he received a new tricuspid valve that was supposed to last for 15, 20 years.

If you’re taking notes, highlight the term “supposed to”.

A couple weeks ago, Dad came down with a case of pneumonia. He’d spent a lot of time coughing and hacking and trying to catch his breath, but it took a while to finally get him to visit the doctor. Why? Because he’s a badass, that’s why. But as it turns out, his level of badassery made nary a bit of difference.

I can’t count the number of doctors who’ve poked their heads into Dad’s hospital room with a stethoscope, placing it at various points on his chest and back and telling him to take deep breaths. When his regular doctor did so, he heard some interesting sounds. The first was fluid in his right lung, an obvious sign of pneumonia. The second was something about his heart. He wasn’t entirely sure what the problem was, so he sent Dad to get a CAT scan right away.

My understanding is that when he got that CAT scan, he became one of the only (if not the only) patient who’s been admitted into the hospital immediately after his scan. They shipped him via ambulance to another hospital that specializes in cardiac treatment. It’s where he had his first open-heart surgery; it ended up being where he had his second as well.

They kept him for about a week, doing all sorts of scans and tests, injecting fluids and withdrawing blood, poking at him with stethoscopes… they did a lot. When looking at the overall results, they saw that both his aortic valve and mitral valve were leaking. They’d pump blood out, but some would wash back in. The mitral valve wasn’t too bad, but the damage to the aortic valve was officially “severe”.

What’s more, they detected some vegetation near the aortic valve, which could signal a bacterial infection. If that was the case, the bacteria could break away at any point, wash into his blood stream and infect God knows what other parts of his body. Much like the valve itself, they couldn’t just leave it sitting there

Most of the doctors thought he’d need to have his aortic valve replaced (again) within the next few months, a decade less than the 15-20 years we expected from the first replacement valve. One doctor thought the damage looked really old and recommended antibiotics for 40 days to get rid of the vegetation, then they’d take another look. If Dad had been okay for this long with a leaky heart, maybe he wouldn’t need surgery at all.

Continue reading “All things considered, Dad’s doing okay.”