Sorry for the radio silence. Things have been busy.
Life's been crazy. Again.
Last Thursday, my dad sneezed. For a normal, healthy person this is not a bad thing (usually) but my father had been in a wreck and fractured his sternum so this sneeze was catastrophic. He felt his sternum "pop" but, being the man he is, shrugged it off and continued as normal as possible. Well, literally 7 days later he was still feeling awful and went in for a CT scan.
At 5:30pm he got a call at work from the radiologist and told him that he needed to go to the ED stat. He drove to the hospital on base where ED docs were waiting for him with a crash cart. For those who don't know, a crash cart is for when a patient goes into cardiac arrest. They immediately ambulanced him over to CFV Hospital where he was put into the ICU.
Why all the panic? He had fluid built up in his pericardium. That's the membrane sac around his heart and if fluid is in there then his heart can't beat... and well, if your heart can't beat then you die.
A day ago he had surgery to insert a tube into the pericardium to drain the fluid. During the surgery the doctors drained 1.5 liters of fluid from around his heart and since then 800 more milliliters have drained out. That was 2.3 liters of fluid around his heart. He could have gone into cardiac arrest at any second.
Luckily, he's doing better today. The draining has slowed down and they've switched him from a morphine drip to taking percocet by mouth. He had a fever the other night but they've since put him on antibiotics. I suppose the fever may be the result of having a huge incision and a tube in his chest, but I'm no professional.
The "pop" he felt when he sneezed was his fractured sternum breaking and overlapping in his chest but the docs won't mess with it until his heart is better. They're gonna wait about 3 weeks and see if they need to open him up, rebreak his sternum and stick a metal plate in there so it'll stay still and heal properly.
He should be coming home on Tuesday as long as there are no complications.
On an entirely different note, I've got a new superhero/masked vigilante obsession. Deadpool. He's basically hilarious and makes me want to buy MvC 3 just so I can play him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn3m8qlVk8w
Please, dear readers, stay safe. I don't want to have to see any more of my loved ones in the hospital.
-That⊗neChick
That's a miracle!
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