Day in the Life of an Idiot

I just noticed that I have failed to update my blog since my dad went into surgery last Wednesday. The trip home on the train that night was absolutely lovely. The train was on time, and, thanks to the flooding in the Dakotas, St. Paul is its terminal stop. I walked home from the Amtrack station, which is six (LONG) blocks from my house. It's a bit of a hike, but it was a lovely night and I had traveled lightly (one backpack). It's always so strange to walk alone at night and I enjoyed the hushed, almost voyeristic sensation of dark streets and bright indoor lights.

My dad seems to be doing well. Today will be his first day out of the hospital, and he's returning to the Bethany Riverside nursing home to continue his recovery. He had hoped to finally be going home, but they need to continue an IV drip of antibiotics to fight off this tenacious infection. If they get this thing beat (and the doctor, the last I heard at any rate, seemed confident they would,) they'll be able to schedule his real-and-for-true hip replacement. That should be some time in September if everything stays positive. If not, my understanding is that they will just have to pospone things until the infection *is* finally cleared up.

My life, meanwhile, continues apace. On the train ride home last Wednesday, I had a kind of breakthrough moment with the newest novel and I like it a lot better. When I like a novel, it writes faster, so that's a very good thing. In fact, just today, while Shawn hung out with a fellow laid-off state employee, I managed to write nearly a thousand words in about an hour. That's my usual pace for a deadline novel.

I also FINALLY had the ceremony in which I received my yellow belt. (I'd tested earlier, but they've moved the ceremony to a later time now.) Turns out, the ceremony is now: "promotion and demo." I didn't know about that last part, so I was taken aback when asked to perform the white belt form in front of an audience. I think I did pretty well, and I was glad I wasn't all alone (an instructor and the blue belt candidate did it with me). Still, the whole time I was thinking, "ah, crap. I didn't take my inhaler because I thought I'd just be standing around" and it was like 103 and humid in the building.) But I didn't need it, even though later I also had to do a cartwheel AND a roll. I was pleased that I was able to do a "flying roll" (really, just a roll from a dead run onto a mat,) because, in all honesty, I like those better than having to start from kneeling or a crouch.

Mason, alas, was in charge of the camera, so, while he took a LOT of pictures, the quality on many of them is dubious. It's a really big shame that Shawn wasn't there with her telephoto lens skillz, because I would have LOVED to have seen myself "in action," as it were. Given how round I am in the one pretty good picture he got, I suspect I look a LOT like Kung Fu Panda.

First of all, I'm very disappointed in the Rapture. Hardly anyone I know either disappeared or turned into a pillar of salt. Sigh.

Perhaps he misread the "maths," as the British would say, and we were supposed to be expecting a few raptors or maybe some captors instead.

So my poor dad spent his 70th birthday in the hospital. For those of you following along, Mort has been in and out of the hospital since a very serious bout of sepis about a month ago. The most recent issue has to do with the fact that he contracted c-def, which, ironically, he got by being in the hospital for so long. C-def is a particularly nasty super-bug that's hard to kill. His other problems were made worse by the fact that c-def causes a lot of diarrhea (a problem he'd already been battling with the sepis). The sepis, which was caused by a kidney stone, has also meant lingering issues with low protien blood level. This has cause fluid swelling and all sorts of nasty side effects.

My dad, in short, is in a very bad way.

However, yesterday and today were good days. My dad, mom and I started strategizing after a particularly unhelpful visit by the nutritionist. I'd asked about foods that might help combat the diarrhea and they didn't have a lot of suggestions. So we went to Dr. Google and my mom thought of probiotics. This morning we talked the doctor into proscribing them (which I guess can be risky in certain situations), and Mort had a nearly-diarrhea free day.

So fingers-crossed.

If he continues to improve, the plan is to move him to what we've been calling a "recovery spa" (really the recovery wing of a nursing home), because this whole illness has made him so weak that he needs extensive physical therapy to get back on his feet (almost literally.)

I plan to stay in LaCrosse until Monday, when he will hopefully make that transition. My mom, who has been the sole care provider each time the hospital dumps him out, has REALLY needed a break -- physically and mentally. I think, particularly for my folks who are both relatively young (and certainly young at heart) and active and normally vibrant, this has been a real blow. It's been hard to keep spirits up. So, one of my jobs here has been just keeping up the pleasant chatter. I've been reading to my dad from the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post. I've been encouraging him to check into his e-mail and do other business that keeps him engaged in moving forward and thinking about the future OUT of the hospital. He's been in so long, I think it's been easy to imagine that this is all there is... or worse, will be.

We, I think, have actually managed to have a little fun. My dad does a lot of work internationally, so I had Mason and Shawn set up a Skype conversation this morning. We've had a LOT of undivided time to talk and I've learned about my dad's experiences with the march on Washington (he was almost headed South to join/support the Freedom Riders, but their bus was divereted to DC.) He was once at a wedding with Sein Finn leader Martin McGuinness, which freaking FLOORED *me*, but which my dad admitted to being completley clueless about. And just general discussion about the "revolution" (which my dad would like to start by instigating more "great books" clubs at coffeeshops around the nation) and the meanness of the recent crop of Republicans/Tea Partiers.

But, I would like my dad to get some positive news and measurable forward progress that would make him really BELIEVE he has the strength to beat this thing. Also, Shawn would like me home soon... and I'd like to go too, but not before I know things are more settled.

I'm going to tell this story in order, but I want to preface this with the note that my dad is making a full recovery. He might even be completely out of the hospital by this coming Saturday (fingers crossed!)

On Friday morning, my mom called with the message that I should come down. She told me that things were going south fast, and that the time to visit was now. I was so unprepared for "the call" I was beside myself. I only delayed going about an hour or so -- long enough to pack and to stop to get Shawn and Mason ready for an extended absence (ie a quick drop off for them at a used bookstore while I ran to the grocery store for food Shawn could make easily.)

I cried nearly the entire drive down. I was especially freaked out when I saw a flock of trumpeter swans circling the marshland, because there was something about white wings in the air that just called to mind death.

When I got there, Mom told me that they were preparing my dad for a risky procedure, which involved attempting to revive his failing kidneys by draining off the fluid. He had three doctors on his team in the ICU and the procedure was so dangerous that one of them voted against it. But, at that point it really seemed like my mom's choices were take the risk or watch him slowly decline.

I gave him a kiss and told him I loved him before they wheeled him away, and my mom, my aunt and I spent the next hour keeping ourselves company while trying not to think about the fact we might not see him alive again. When the doctor came back without him, we nearly all had heart attacks but the news was good. The procedure went according to plan and now it was just a matter of watching to see if he made it through the night.

When it seemed as though things were going okay, I talked my mom into going home and trying to get some decent rest. I stayed. It was one of the longest nights of my life. At points, my dad was awake and we talked, but at others, when he was drifting in and out of consciousness, I talked to myself or thought a lot of hard, intense thoughts. When my dad finally fell into a restful sleep around two in the morning, I followed suit. But we were both up by six, as they had other tests they wanted to perform -- one of the complications involved the fact that the sepis triggered a number of here-to-for undiscovered conditions. Also it took going into the kidney to perform the scary procedure for the doctors to figure out that the sepis was probably caused by a kidney stone that my dad somehow never felt (which they still need to remove, but they're waiting until he's at full strength.)

At any rate, after that night things began to steadily improve. I decided it was okay to leave the bedside some time around Sunday afternoon, even though he was still in the ICU/CCU (Critical Care Unit). He had made such vast improvements, we kind of became the "fun" room, in that the nurses would sit in our room to do their "paperwork" on the computer. Mom and I kept a steady stream of the kind of conversation that we'd normally have while sitting on the front three-season porch at home. My dad would perk up enough to throw in his observations or comments before drifting back to sleep. That probably still sounds pretty awful, but the difference was astounding. He was hungry and eating food, and starting to complain about how irritating it was to be stuck in bed. When I heard from my mom on Monday that he was asking for his laptop, I knew he was very, VERY likely to be okay.

My dad is in the middle of revising a book of his own, though his is non-fiction and probably has something to do with qualitative research, psychology or any of his other areas of interst. Anyway, the fact that he was ready to get back to work is truly heartening.

In the meantime, I've been trying to get back to my own life a little. I helped my martial arts studio move house a little yesterday, which was great fun, actually. My muscles are sore from the lifting and whatnot, but I got to see a video of my head instructor in his college days (with hair!) in which he battled a pipecleaner (stop-motion art project type thing). It was AWESOME.

At any rate, now I have to decide what to work on. Probably, I should figure out how to write the cow mutilation story that Penguin bought. :-)