heartstrings

Tuesday, may. 6, 2008   |   0 comments

Another UPDATE: As of Friday, my dad’s back at home, feeling better but with his ailments still more or less undiagnosed. We’re all very relieved that he won’t be needing surgery, but the looming odyssey of medicinal trial-and-erroring as the doctors try to figure out what’s wrong and, more importantly, how to solve it, is maybe a little bit anxious-making? Hm. In any case…onward and upward. Right?

UPDATE: So my dad had his angiogram yesterday (it was scheduled for 11:30 but he didn’t go in until 7, which as you may know is a lot, lot, lot of the longest kind of hours, especially for my dad who wasn’t allowed to eat or drink the whole day, fun). The good news is that they didn’t spot anything more than a few moderate problems with his arteries, so there seems to be no need for another bypass, which is great! But there’s still the little matter of figuring out what’s behind his failed treadmill test and the heart pains, the shortness of breath, the professor and Mary Ann…So! He’s still in the hospital while they run more tests. And I’m back at work, wondering and waiting and eating my weight in cookies, huzzah?

So I just got word that my pop’s in the hospital with heart woes again, after having his triple bypass eight years ago. They’re pretty sure it’s only going to be a matter of going in (through his thigh!) to do a little angioplasty angiogram, and maybe add a shunt (or is it a stint? stent (thanks, Karen!)), and they’re very optimistic, like 98% so (hospitals like the percentages, and as far as percentages go, that’s a good one!), that it’s just going to be an in-and-out one-day procedure, nothing too scary at all. And when my dad arrived at the hospital (via ambulance, not at all fun, bleh), there were two other guys lined up in the heart room, both having had heart surgery a number of years before, just like my dad, and now back in the hospital with shortness of breath and heart pains, just like my dad. So it’s more common than you’d think, more like a garden snake than the rattler it could be.

So it’s all very much in “it could be much worse”-ville, but still I reacted not so swimmingly to the news. I was at work, in a meeting, and got back to my desk to find a number of messages from my stepmother, who never ever calls unexpectedly. So, with that sinking “unexpected call” feeling, I called her back and got all the details and was totally fine and sane. And then I went back to my desk and…sudden showers! It was like when you hit your head on a dumb cupboard door that you yourself left open and abruptly burst into tears, not so much because it hurts, even if it does very much hurt, but because it surprised you? And you’re also frustrated with yourself for being so dramatic, and that frustration makes you cry some more?

If you’ve worked in corporate culture, and have weak eyes, then maybe you know the particular awfulness that is sitting in your small, grey, sound-porous cube and snuffling very, very quietly, because more than anything, you don’t want your coworkers to notice that something’s wrong because then you’d have to talk about it, and when you’re only just managing to keep it together, nothing opens those floodgates worse than having to talk about it.

And then! After work, walking to the bus stop, I kept freaking myself out like you do after watching a scary movie, where without really trying you can transform an innocent, early evening trip downstairs to get the mail into this harrowing, heart-beat drum solo of self-manufactured fear. I kept imaging worse-case scenarios and then feeling sorry for myself over these imagined scenarios, and then I’d get all weepy and snortly all over again.

But yes. Anyway. I’ve taken the day off work. I’ve lined myself up with a Zipcar for the whole day so I can drive myself to the hospital and eat hospital pudding from the hospital cafeteria and give my dad some high-fives and listen to the doctors tell those weird flat jokes that they always seem to tell, and everything is going to be totally fine.