My father's condition
So much has happened in the last few days that I know it would be best for me to write type it down and cite it later.
For my father's birthday on 06 July, the entire family took the day off and we were all to have a nice Jew brunch either at home or at The Rascal House, followed by some pokerring at the casino and a nice dinner at Beni Hana's (one of those Japanese places where they cook on the table in front of you).
The morning of my father's birthday had him wake up very short and quick of breath. He complained that he couldn't breathe deep at all, experienced debilitating chest pains, and couldn't really find the strength to leave his bed once he sat up. After a few minutes of this, my mother wakes me and my sisters up and says that she's going to take him down to the hospital in downtown Miami (about 20 miles away) where he's been going for the past year for his cancer treatments. I roll out of bed and, with much labour, we get him into his wheelchair and roll him to my mother's car. He musters up the strength to get into the passenger seat as I tell my mother that my sisters and I will get dressed and meet them down there soon.
As we're walking back to the house and my mother pulls out of the driveway and around the house, she slams on the breaks, rolls down the window and yells, "He's not going to make it! He's not going to make it! Call 911!" At this point, my father had declined his seat as far back as it could go so that he was laying down and out of view from the window. By the time I had turned around, Sara had her cell phone in her hand and 911 across her fingertips. I ran down to the neighbourhood guardhouse and told them to clear out the men doing work on the front gate because an ambulance was on its way. Bari and my mother tended to my father as best as they could, but I think they were stunned with panic more than anything else.
Within a couple minutes, an ambulance from a closer hospital (about four miles from my house) had arrived at the scene. After asking questions, they sat my father up in a stretcher/wheelchair hybrid, got him in the truck, nitro-and-O2ed him and took off. I threw on some shoes and followed immediately behind them in my mother's car with my sister's in tow, everyone suited in pajamas. I pop on my hazard lights and tell my sisters to hold on as I take the red light of NE 12th at 35 MPH right behind the ambulance. The ambulance then pulls over and slows down. My mother calls and says, “The driver says turn off your hazards and don’t follow us through red lights. Everyone in cross-traffic expects the ambulance to go through but no one expects the trailing Trail Blazer.” Good point- I backed off. We pull up to the ER, get out and wait anxiously for any news.
It was later boiled down to two competing theories but the one I put the most stock in is as follows. My father’s heavy smoking habit- decades running that he quit but four years ago-is at fault. Smoking allows a sort of “lesion” to grow on the lungs, as they seem to have done on my father’s. One of them died recently and, when my father sat up in bed that morning, he strained and his right lung, where the lesion was, just ripped open. His lung deflated and left an air-filled cavity in his chest that soon began filling with liquid. His lung wet-ragged itself onto his heart, distressing it further. By the time we got him to my mother’s car, his cavity had collected a lot of liquid. When he laid his seat back, the liquid redistributed itself and sloshed against his heart, which was “the end of normal cardiac function.”
They installed a tube directly through his ribs into his cavity to evacuate the collected air and liquids. The hospital has given my father until tomorrow to heal his lung but it hasn’t worked, so they are going to do it for him via noninvasive orthoscopic surgery tomorrow afternoon. He’ll then be watched at least through next weekend in the hospital’s ICU. The first night in, he convinced Amy to smuggle him in some Chinese take-out. There was my father, connected to tubes, monitors, and machines everywhere like the internet, just having gotten over several hours of irregular heartbeats, eating Chinese out of the carton.
I’m too tired to continue typing the rest of the jazz that’s been going on, so expect another update sometime soon about the rest of it and how my father is doing, post-surgery.
For my father's birthday on 06 July, the entire family took the day off and we were all to have a nice Jew brunch either at home or at The Rascal House, followed by some pokerring at the casino and a nice dinner at Beni Hana's (one of those Japanese places where they cook on the table in front of you).
The morning of my father's birthday had him wake up very short and quick of breath. He complained that he couldn't breathe deep at all, experienced debilitating chest pains, and couldn't really find the strength to leave his bed once he sat up. After a few minutes of this, my mother wakes me and my sisters up and says that she's going to take him down to the hospital in downtown Miami (about 20 miles away) where he's been going for the past year for his cancer treatments. I roll out of bed and, with much labour, we get him into his wheelchair and roll him to my mother's car. He musters up the strength to get into the passenger seat as I tell my mother that my sisters and I will get dressed and meet them down there soon.
As we're walking back to the house and my mother pulls out of the driveway and around the house, she slams on the breaks, rolls down the window and yells, "He's not going to make it! He's not going to make it! Call 911!" At this point, my father had declined his seat as far back as it could go so that he was laying down and out of view from the window. By the time I had turned around, Sara had her cell phone in her hand and 911 across her fingertips. I ran down to the neighbourhood guardhouse and told them to clear out the men doing work on the front gate because an ambulance was on its way. Bari and my mother tended to my father as best as they could, but I think they were stunned with panic more than anything else.
Within a couple minutes, an ambulance from a closer hospital (about four miles from my house) had arrived at the scene. After asking questions, they sat my father up in a stretcher/wheelchair hybrid, got him in the truck, nitro-and-O2ed him and took off. I threw on some shoes and followed immediately behind them in my mother's car with my sister's in tow, everyone suited in pajamas. I pop on my hazard lights and tell my sisters to hold on as I take the red light of NE 12th at 35 MPH right behind the ambulance. The ambulance then pulls over and slows down. My mother calls and says, “The driver says turn off your hazards and don’t follow us through red lights. Everyone in cross-traffic expects the ambulance to go through but no one expects the trailing Trail Blazer.” Good point- I backed off. We pull up to the ER, get out and wait anxiously for any news.
It was later boiled down to two competing theories but the one I put the most stock in is as follows. My father’s heavy smoking habit- decades running that he quit but four years ago-is at fault. Smoking allows a sort of “lesion” to grow on the lungs, as they seem to have done on my father’s. One of them died recently and, when my father sat up in bed that morning, he strained and his right lung, where the lesion was, just ripped open. His lung deflated and left an air-filled cavity in his chest that soon began filling with liquid. His lung wet-ragged itself onto his heart, distressing it further. By the time we got him to my mother’s car, his cavity had collected a lot of liquid. When he laid his seat back, the liquid redistributed itself and sloshed against his heart, which was “the end of normal cardiac function.”
They installed a tube directly through his ribs into his cavity to evacuate the collected air and liquids. The hospital has given my father until tomorrow to heal his lung but it hasn’t worked, so they are going to do it for him via noninvasive orthoscopic surgery tomorrow afternoon. He’ll then be watched at least through next weekend in the hospital’s ICU. The first night in, he convinced Amy to smuggle him in some Chinese take-out. There was my father, connected to tubes, monitors, and machines everywhere like the internet, just having gotten over several hours of irregular heartbeats, eating Chinese out of the carton.
I’m too tired to continue typing the rest of the jazz that’s been going on, so expect another update sometime soon about the rest of it and how my father is doing, post-surgery.