Okay it’s been awhile… sorry about that. My last week has been pretty hectic, with a lot of freaking out on my part. The past few days involved driving my parents back to PEI and watching Dad be in the hospital there instead of the one here, finding out that my car was about to die, borrowing my brother’s car and coming back here so that I wouldn’t miss any doctors’ appointments.

So, what happened with my father: Basically last month when he was sick, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, it was that he was having an aneurysm in his aorta. Basically that means the main aorta that leads out of his heart had a big tear in it. Since my father’s heart is weird (his aorta is in backwards– it’s not a big deal, it’s just a congenital thing, and he’s known about that for a long time) when they x-rayed him at the hospital in January they missed the aneurysm. He was getting ready to go back to work– was starting to feel better, eating more, etc etc– and had to go to his doctor’s to make sure it was okay. That appointment was for Thursday of last week– on Tuesday his doctor called to say “hey I noticed the heart specialist didn’t have them do a CAT scan/dye test, go get that done and I’ll see you on Thursday”. Well he went to get that done and that’s when they noticed the aneurysm and all hell broke loose.

He was transported here to Halifax by ambulance (they were going to airlift him but the helicopter was broken — great huh?) and what the dr’s in PEI had told my mom was that he would more than likely be getting open heart surgery. My sister drove over with my mom so she only got here at around 6:30 at night– Dad got here at 3. Rob and I were waiting for him. He waited in the ER for about an hour (on a stretcher, with medical attention, I just mean that he wasn’t admitted immediately). The doctors there checked him out and said yes, it is an aneurysm but no, we’re not going to operate right away. They decided that since it was more than likely a month-old tear in his aorta it probably wouldn’t be getting any bigger, and since it wasn’t affecting any of his other main blood vessels (for example the ones that lead to his legs or his head or anything) they would try seeing if they could fix it with medication instead of opting to cut him open and mess around in his insides. That meant giving him vitamin K to counter-effect the blood thinners he’d been on for the past month, along with some other medications to lower his blood pressure (it wasn’t high– it was normal, around 125/80, but in order to heal the tear, he has to keep his blood pressure at around 110/70 so it needed to be lower) . There were other meds which I don’t remember. Then they admitted him to the cardiac ICU, where he stayed for about two hours and then my mom and sister got there.
My mom was so afraid and so freaked out– I can’t stand the thought of anything like this happening to Rob, so I can barely imagine her emotional state when the man she’s loved for 35 years is going through something like this.

Anyway Dad was then moved from the ICU to the “step-down” unit, because he didn’t need intensive care, just, you know, regular care. And there he stayed for quite a few days, monitoring his blood pressure and his heart rate and his breathing and all kinds of things. He had three IVs at one point, which I know he didn’t enjoy at all (uhm, he didn’t enjoy anything at all about the entire experience, really). Days of exhaustion emotional and physical for Rob, my mother, and I, going to and from the hospital, not sleeping at night because of worry, trying to visit and somehow manage to not notice when the man in the next bed had a seizure or the lady in the bed across was stripped naked by the nurse and they didn’t even bother to pull the curtains (excuse me but please if I’m ever in the hospital and unable to speak for myself– I just want it known here and now that you must PULL THE DAMN CURTAINS when you’re taking my clothes off! Unless you’re paying me!).

Then last Thursday the doctors here said it was okay for him to go back to PEI but that he had to be admitted to hospital there– there was nothing more they were doing for him here in Halifax, now that he’d seen the specialists and all, that they couldn’t do in PEI. So fine. I drove them there, going as fast as I could– the doctors allowed him to go in the car instead of the ambulance as long as I could get him there within 4 hours so that he could get his next medication. Well I did it.
Then I stayed in PEI til Sunday and came home and now I’m home. And my dad got to go home today so uhm, yeah.

He’s okay. he’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay. That’s all.

Oh and uhm, something. Wait a second. Oh yeah. I want this so bad it isn’t funny. AND I CAN’T BUY IT BECAUSE MY INSURANCE IS DICKING AROUND AND WE’VE GOT NEGATIVE ZERO ZERO MONEY AGAIN!
stupid insurance.

But my dad is okay. MY DAD IS OKAY.