Long Week

I spent most of Monday with my father in the hospital. This wasn't because he was having a medical crisis, exactly; it was mainly to disseminate information and keep everyone else from panicking.

So what happened? Well, sometime around Friday evening, he had a very minor stroke - so minor he didn't even notice it. Over the weekend, he reported that his balance was a little off, and that he was having a bit of numbness inside his right hand: his sense of touch was fine, but the hand kind of felt like he'd slept on it funny. Plus, he was having an odd bit of numbness inside his cheek, just at the base of his tongue. It wasn't until Monday morning that he connected the dots, and realized that the balance issue might have to do with reduced feedback sensitivity from his right leg, and that all three of these (fairly trivial) symptoms were on the right side of his body.

So, after a bit of internal debate, he decided to visit a hospital and get himself checked out. So he called up a family friend (one of my mother's oldest and most steadfast friends) and explained the situation and asked her to drive him to the hospital.

She promptly called me at work and said, "Your Dad had a stroke, meet at the emergency room at the hospital." This, while absolutely true, was perhaps not the most detailed or reassuring way to explain the situation.

But, okay: I drove down, met her in the emergency room, and spent the next eight hours sitting with my dad. Most of that time was spent waiting for the doctors to run tests, or to get back to us with the results of tests they'd already run. Once an hour or so, one of the nurses would come by and ask a lot of questions: Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? Who's the president? Who was the president before him? What year is this? What's the date? Then they'd make him do things like lift one leg and hold it up, or push and pull with his arms.

Occasionally, when we actually got information, I'd text it to the immediate family and a couple of close friends. But mainly it was just sitting there, chatting and waiting.

The CAT scan revealed something that looked like some bleeding at the back of the skull, but the MRI (which gives a much more detailed picture but consequently takes much longer to read) showed that as a cluster of veins, and not as any sort of intracranial bleeding. The stroke itself was apparently visible - a tiny thing way down on the left side of the brain. They decided that they were definitely going to admit him to the hospital (all this was taking place in the emergency room, rather than the hospital proper) but then took several hours to find him a room. We were kind of expecting that; hospital visits almost always consist of a great deal of extended waiting, broken up by occasional periods of more waiting. And the staff was thoroughly professional and even quite nice.

There was some discussion of having him looked over by physical therapists and occupational therapists, but his symptoms were so minor that I doubt there's much they could do; I don't know if they ever actually came by. Dad was alert, perfectly well oriented, and quite capable of say, walking or feeding himself (when they finally let us order him some food) or drinking his tea (ditto). So, again, definitely a stroke, but just about as harmless as a stroke can ever possibly be.

And they didn't even find much in the way of probable causes or contributing factors. He doesn't smoke; he drinks, but very moderately; his blood pressure is fine. He had a heart bypass years ago, and some stents put in more recently, but they did an echocardiogram (I think? And I've probably mangled the spelling horribly...) and apparently didn't find any significant issues there.

So they released him yesterday, and I drove back down to the hospital and then drove him back to his house. He's due to go on a mission trip in two weeks (a medical mission, so he'll be in the company of doctors and dentists and suchlike, but also in the middle of nowhere) and the hospital-doctors didn't have any real objection to that. (We're still waiting to hear back from the going-on-the-mission-doctors, though.) They've upped his daily aspirin intake and the dosage on one of his anti-cholesterol/blood thinning medications, but that's about it.

You wouldn't think that sitting around for a day or two would be that tiring, but the whole thing has worn me out. I really want to just crawl into my bed and stay there for a day or two, but we're a bit shorthanded at work and I really can't. So I'm off, but I've promised myself that as soon as I get back home I am Going To Bed. And I hope the rest of you are taking good care of yourselves out there, too.