Enervating days

"Enervating" is the adjective that probably best describes the last week or so — and no, I'm not going to send you looking for a dictionary like I usually do to find out what it means (on the off-chance that you don't already know). Here's the entry from Dictionary.com:

adj. (ĭ-nûr´vĭt) Deprived of strength; debilitated.

My mom had a heart attack last Monday night. She survived it, but they transferred her from the local hospital to a cardiac care unit in the Twin Cities for more tests, where they decided that she was going to need multiple bypass surgery. I found out on Tuesday, and Kathleen drove me over to Chicago on Wednesday morning, then my older brother Mike and I headed up to Minnesota together that same day. (BTW, I did not take a suit with me, and neither did Mike.)

Initially, they told us the surgery was scheduled for Thursday morning, so we figured we had to be up there by Wednesday night. We went straight to the hospital, and when we got in, we found out they'd canceled Thursday morning and were now saying Friday because they hadn't completed all of the tests. She had eight blockages, and they were talking about repairing five of them. They were also contemplating a repair or replacement of a valve and maybe cleaning out her carotid arteries as well.

By Thursday morning they had the other test results, but canceled Friday's surgery in order to allow her get stronger and to coordinate a bit more among her various doctors and the surgeons. They rescheduled the surgery for this Tuesday. I'd been off work since Wednesday (and wasn't much good to anyone after I found out on Tuesday), and at that point I pretty much knew I wasn't going to be able to stay through the weekend and stick around for the surgery.

So we spent as much time as we could at the hospital with her, then my brother and I headed back to the Chicago area late Friday afternoon. I caught the Amtrak back to East Lansing on Saturday and got in about 8:30 Saturday night.

It seems like it was an incredibly long few days. I didn't have Internet access up there—we stayed at the house of a friend of Mike's who lives out in the country, and although he had a wireless network in the house, he was out of town for a snowshoe race in Vermont and we neglected to ask him for the key. It was an old DSL set-up, so there wasn't even a network cable I could plug in. And to be honest there really wasn't a lot of time for doing e-mail and stuff like this anyway.

So after I got home, I answered a few messages and sent out some updates, helped run the softball clinics on Sunday and was back at my desk and trying to get caught up on Monday and Tuesday.

When I talked to Mom on Monday night, she seemed pretty stressed out and more than a little angry about how things were going: She was getting a different surgeon than the one she'd been talking to, a different cardiologist would be taking over her case after the bypass , and they trying to move her to the room she'd be in when she came out of surgery. She didn't even want to talk to my youngest daughter Sarah — just asked me to tell her that she loved her.

Since Mom and I (and my daughter Rosie and my late grandfather) share essentially the same personality, I could imagine how she was feeling. I would have been wound up and ticked off too. When Mike and I were up there, the most troubling about the care she was (or wasn't) getting was the uncertainty. It seemed like no one was quarterbacking things, and that a lot of what was going on had more to do with the hospital bureaucracy and scheduling convenience than it did health care delivery and her best interests.

She was supposed to go into surgery at 8:30 AM yesterday (7:30 her time), but because they had some concerns about the ventilator tube that they needed to put in while she was under (she'd basically told the nurses the other day that she'd try to yank it out because it made her claustrophobic, anesthesia or no), they wanted to check the records of her last surgery at the local hospital to see how she tolerated it there. And the answer was that she tolerated it — at least until she got into recovery, which was where she said she tried to remove it.

But all of that took time and someone else got in the queue ahead of her, so she didn't go in until about 10:50 AM. They told us to expect her to be in there for 4-6 hours. Paul called to update me around mid-afternoon, to say things were going well — about as they expected. But when I hadn't heard anything more by 5 PM, I was getting a little worried.

Paul finally called at around 6 PM, while we were waiting for Rosie to finish softball practice up at the Complex. He said it went pretty well, that she got through the surgery okay—quadruple bypass (instead of triple) and they did replace the iffy valve with a mechanical one. He said she'd probably be kind of out of it and would likely be on the ventilator for 5-6 hours, but was expected to do okay. I asked him to give me a call and an update this morning.

The update this morning wasn't so encouraging. Mom's in ICU and they can't seem to get her blood pressure back up. They've gave her 3 units of blood overnight and are using four medications to try to get her pressure up where it should be. According to Paul, they're giving her "maximum support." She's also got some kind of external pacemaker and is still on the ventilator, in that kind of dopey, post-op haze. So she may not even know what's going on, although Paul says she turns toward my sister Betsy's voice and wiggles her toes.

Meanwhile, Kathleen — who is probably the world's most efficient Googler when it comes to medical stuff — found this, which may or may not be relevant, although Mom does have a bunch of the risk factors they associate with it:

Postoperative bradyarrhythmias, heart rhythm disturbances where the heart beats too slow, require permanent pacemaker implantation in 0.8 to 4 percent of patients. Risk factors include concomitant valve surgery, older age, preexisting bundle branch block (abnormalities in the conduction system that alter the flow of electrical impulses through the heart), certain solutions used to arrest the heart beat during surgery, and long duration of time on the heart-lung machine.

And a few minutes ago, I ran into Sandra — my colleague, friend and boss — out in the hall, and she told me that her father had gone through a similar thing after his bypass surgery (including getting "Code Blue" and the paddles three times) and he got through it okay, although the first few days were touch and go.

So both of those things give me some cause for hope. Which reminds me, and RN named Hope, who actually works in a cardiothoracic ICU and is a member of one of Captain Marvel e-mail lists I belong to, also sent me an encouraging private note this morning.

Mike just called and gave me an update: They backed off one of the meds by 50% and nothing changed, which they think is a good thing (as opposed to her pressure dropping, I suppose). They also said she's able to breath a little on her own, but that they'll keep her on "assisted breathing" for now so her body doesn't get exhausted from just trying to breathe. And basically, the message is that while this isn't common, it's not unusual either. Some people take longer to recover after you saw open their sternum, stop their heart and hook them to a machine for a few hours. Imagine that.

In any case, there are a lot of folks out here who are pulling for, praying for, thinking about and sending good thoughts for my mom, and that's very much appreciated. Now all she's gotta do is get well so I can tell her about all the attention she's been getting...