Dad's at the Foothills Hospital

Got out of a meeting at work today at noon to find a message on the work answering machine from my mom letting me know that they had loaded Dad into the ambulance at 10:45 & were sending him down to Calgary for the angiogram. So I headed down to the foothills hospital, arriving at around 12:30/12:45 & met & chatted with dad. At 1:45 he went into the room for his angiogram & I went out to get some food, etc. Upon returning, they let me know that he had a couple of blockages & they were doing two angioplasties on him (they use little balloons to expand the arteries & then put in a shunt to hold the arteries open).

So, at 5ish or so I was able to come in & see him. They insert the catheter into a major artery in the groin area & then shove the tube thing up to his heart & start injecting dye so they can see the blockages & so after you're done, they have to make sure that heals well otherwise you could bleed to death. So it means lying still for 4 hours straight (taking him to 9PM). Somewhere along the way he did something to open it up & they had to sort of reseal it which then took him until 10:30 PM before he could move. So he was going a bit stir crazy until then. I ended up staying until 10:10 - guess visiting hours technically ended at 10, but the nurse let me stay a bit longer.

Good news is the blockages in the arteries are removed. Bad news (or just not the "everything's good now" news) is that the irregular heartbeat thing is still there. They wanted to see if removing the blockages would fix it, but it didn't. He had a couple of episodes while I was with him - just minor bits, but they're still there. They're trying to treat it some/bring it under control with medications. So they will have to run electro-physiology tests tomorrow or the next day. They also found one of his arteries is, well, just abnormally placed. Don't have the diagrams with me & can't remember the names, but there's the right coronary artery & the left coronary artery on either side of the heart sort of feeding into the heart. Then there's another big one sort of in the middle of the two (though sort of branching off the left coronary artery. I think they're all connected to the aorta, but I really don't know. Anyhow in dad, from what they've said it looks like the middle artery is connected to the right coronary artery & the two are sort of a bit disconnected to the left artery. Guess this is 'congenital' (I don't know what these words mean: congenital, congestive, congenitve... i don't know which ones are real words & which one's I've made up....) - it's something he's been born with (and maybe has passed on to us boys)... no one's sure if this is a problem or not. They also figure that he's had a couple of heart attacks - one recently at any rate. & so with the concern from past doctors about the 30% return flow, we may be looking at valve or muscle damage which may be a bit harder to deal with. (and have no real idea how they're planning to fix the irregular heartbeat). They may end up giving him an MRI, too.

So yeah, looks like he's in the hospital here for at least 2 more days... though it's really unclear what's going to happen or how long it'll take to fix things...

Hate the not knowing part & the waiting part. Makes me wish I paid better attention in biology classes....

Thanks for your thoughts/prayers