The Worst Month of Dad's Life!

My dad has been through the fire! At the end of January, Ryan and I and the kids met my parents in St. George for the weekend. My dad was working on fixing the kids 4 wheeler wheel and was feeling great when we got there. (He had just had double knee replacements in June, and was now really feeling good.) He read the kids a story before they went to bed and then Ryan and I stayed up with him and my mom to play cards. That night we were woken by my mom yelling "Callie! Help! Callie!" Ryan and I ran down the hall. My dad was unresponsive, he couldn't talk, and we didn't know if he could understand us. Ryan called the paramedics right away. It took them FOREVER to get there! Once they did, they did some checking - my mom was pretty sure that he had had a seizure. They loaded him in the ambulance and drove him down to the hospital. Mom and I jumped in the truck and went down. When we got there, he was able to talk which was such a relief, but his blood pressure was dropping. He was telling us that his arms and chest hurt. The ER ran EKG's (3) and said something wasn't right, but it didn't look like a heart attack. They took him back to do a CAT and then came back and told us to wait in a trauma room because he wasn't doing well. STRESS!

When they brought him back, he was still telling us his arms hurt, everyone attributed hurting arms to the seizure. The nurse said that, "a miracle had happened in there", and his blood pressure was holding. The CAT scan didn't show any tumors or lesions (great?!). They said that if someone over 40 has a seizure and hasn't before, there usually is a reason. My mom noticed a large lump on his right arm and called the doctor back in. They went to look at the scan and came back and said he had broke his shoulder. They had x-ray come in and take several extremely painful x-rays, then the orthopedic surgeon came in. He told us that dad had dislocated both shoulders and broken the heads off of both of his humerus bones! This brought up the question of what had happened again - no one could believe that he could have broken both shoulders so severely while in bed! (Dad started referring to it as a horrible sleeping accident!) Really he just might be superman! Now we were admitted to the hospital - after first unsuccessfully trying to re-locate the dislocated shoulders.

The good news about finally knowing at least part of what was wrong, was that he could finally get some pain medication! He waited hours with nothing - and you would have had no idea what he was going through, because he doesn't complain. Not that the pain medication could do much, but maybe take the edge off. Now they started test after test. What caused the seizure? They did an echo cardiogram and ran blood tests for heart function. They did a second CAT scan They did an MRI to check his brain, and spinal chord. They did EEG to test brain function. They found a heart murmur that he has had for a long time, but other than that they couldn't say what could have caused the seizure. My dad was his usual smiling self throughout. Doctors and nurses would come in and say, "What are you smiling about?!"

The orthopedic surgeon came in to talk about surgery.

Dad, "Can you do it today?",

him, "How about tomorrow?"

Dad, "Can you do both at the same time?"

Him, "I guess we could."

So we then are getting ready for surgery in the morning. The anesthesiologist recommended one at a time, so we ended up doing the right one that day (Sunday, Jan. 30), and the left one the next (Monday, Jan. 31). The surgeries went well, they had to remove the broken humerus head and put in a titanium head that hammers into the bone, and then attach the muscle over the top of it to hold it in place. The surgeon said he does a lot of these, and dad's was as bad as he had seen - and he hadn't ever seen 2 so bad. (Dad is good at doing stuff well. The knee surgeon said almost the same thing about how bad his knees were!) He had torn his rotator cuff years ago and they had to do some extra work to reattach all that muscle. Ryan and I went home, and my poor mom was left alone in St. George to handle all this. No one at the hospital realized the extent of Dad's injuries (he still was smiling) and every time anyone came in they would pat his shoulders or try to move him, so it was really exhausting to have to explain to everyone not to move him or touch him, especially on no sleep and extreme stress - and we didn't dare leave him!

A cardiologist came in and said that dad had a valve that wasn't working properly and would need open heart surgery. The cardiac surgeon came and said that he probably shouldn't have had the shoulder surgeries, (too much stress on a valve that wasn't working properly) but since everything went well, he guessed that was OK. They had run all the tests, and couldn't really tell us much.

They released dad on Thursday night - he had been in the hospital 6 days, but was still doing really bad. We didn't want him to be released! He was on oxygen, blacking out and feeling really horrible. Traci and I drove down to help mom get him home. We were all stressed out. He couldn't get out of pain, couldn't get comfortable, couldn't sleep. And couldn't move his arms at all! My mom went back to work for 2 days, and threw out her back. The next week, dad had an appointment for a consultation with the cardiac surgeon in Salt Lake. Dad tells Linda and Diane he is having surgery, we say he isn't, it is just a consult. Traci meets mom and dad there and calls me on the phone and tells me they have admitted dad - he has talked the Doctor into doing the surgery tomorrow!! MORE STRESS!!

We all try to spend as much time with dad as possible before. They tell us he will be in surgery for 4 hours! At 3 hours they call mom and tell her they have found some surprises and will be closer to 6 hours. We wait. Finally the doctor comes out and tells us, "He must have known that he had to get in right away. He could have died any time." He explained that they went in to fix the valve that was bicuspid rather than tri-cuspid (birth defect), and found calcium deposits that were open to the blood stream and powdery, they found 2 aneurysms; one on his ascending aorta, and another just below the valve they replaced (that one was so thin that you could see through it), and had a hole in his heart, another birth defect. They had to cool his body down to stop his blood pumping for 4 minutes. But after all that... he was doing well. And the surgery was behind us, and best of all the surgeon thinks that his heart most likely caused the seizure.

Wonderful! All fixed. Now he just has several more months of rehab ahead of him. It all probably happened for a reason - but man it has been hard!