in the absence of any actual information, one waits.

so the update is:

my dad’s still in the hospital. they moved him out of the intensive care unit after a day, into one of the normal rooms on the third floor. someone remarked that it would be less traumatic than being in the icu, which theoretically would have been true had the person sharing his new room not been some really old guy who kept giving a “AUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH” death gasp every half an hour or so. unsurprisingly, we requested a switch, so they put him next door with someone quieter. except for the intermittent sucking-slurping-through-hoses sounds every so often. i don’t think i want to know. really.

he’s a little stronger and more alert every day. which was not to say that he wasn’t alert to begin with, but that first day in the hospital he looked sooo tired and sooo old. he wasn’t incoherent, but just sort of confused and kept giving the wrong answers to things. misremembering. and counting and dates were hopeless. now at times he can count without a problem, but still dates and years escape him. when we ask him what year he was born in, he thinks, and says, “19, um, no, 18, uh, 1896.”

it’s funny because when he does this, he gives me this look. this look is something i’ve gotten for years and years, when he was telling me something and trying to make a particular point, and he’d say it and then give me the look to see if i agreed or understood. but now i see him making this look, and it’s more to see if what he was saying was actually right or not. because he can’t really tell if it is.

then there was the point on friday when he couldn’t remember what my name was.

the deal is that he’s not on blood thinners right now after all, but they’re just seeing if the clot will dissipate on its own. there’s still the question of whether there’s a tumor in there or not, but again, from the cat scan, they can’t tell really until the clot is gone. there’s talk of some special MRI that they can do which might give more information, but that requires going to a different hospital, which also requires getting insurance approval for both that and transport to said hospital. hopefully that will happen in the next few days.

the big decision remains whether to have surgery and get whatever’s in there out, if it does turn out to be a tumor. it seems like you’d want to avoid BRAIN SURGERY if at all possible, because BRAIN SURGERY is the type of thing that you can’t stop being alarmed at: BRAIN SURGERY!!! however, if the alternative is that he stays like this and doesn’t end up getting better…? that now is not just a several month recovery, that’s not a lifestyle change. and maybe my parents would move back to taiwan so more people could help.

but i’m getting ahead of myself. we’ll see what the special MRI comes up with. if anything.

in the meantime, i hear that they’ve moved him to the fourth floor for recovery, to do more physical therapy to help him walk better as well as possible speech therapy (although i don’t really feel like he seems to need it at all). the upside is that he’s now in a private room. look, an upside! yay!

i flew back home this morning, while hmc and snapper are staying in lost angels for the week. since i need to come back down for work on friday, hmc thought it would be easier for her to hang out for the week down there, because she could have her mom help out. i’ll fly back down thursday night, and then we’ll drive home on sunday.

of course, all plans subject to sudden drastic change. as usual.

Posted at November 26, 2007 11:22 PM