Author: Shawn

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All things considered, Dad’s doing okay.

Some of you have heard about this through my friends and family; some haven’t and thus have no idea what the title of this blog entry entails. The short, short version? Dad had open-heart surgery on Thursday and seems to be recovering nicely. (I hear that generic orange popsicles are “the best popsicles ever” when they’re the first thing you eat after surgery.)

The longer story about Dad’s heart goes back about six years. First off, he’s a mutant. Seriously. He has a genetic mutation that resulted in his being born with a bicuspid aortic valve (vs. most people’s tricuspid valve). That never kept him from being active and playing sports better than his friends as they got older (probably not a result of his being a mutant, but you never know…).

Back in November ’07, Dad had a heart attack and needed double-bypass surgery, so they replaced his aortic valve at the same time. If I remember right, it was leaking a little bit at the time, but not enough to do anything drastic. Still, since they were already performing open-heart surgery—the blockages were in places where the doctors couldn’t just use a stint—they found a piggy that may or may not have volunteered to have its own aortic valve put into Dad’s chest. Thus, he received a new tricuspid valve that was supposed to last for 15, 20 years.

If you’re taking notes, highlight the term “supposed to”.

A couple weeks ago, Dad came down with a case of pneumonia. He’d spent a lot of time coughing and hacking and trying to catch his breath, but it took a while to finally get him to visit the doctor. Why? Because he’s a badass, that’s why. But as it turns out, his level of badassery made nary a bit of difference.

I can’t count the number of doctors who’ve poked their heads into Dad’s hospital room with a stethoscope, placing it at various points on his chest and back and telling him to take deep breaths. When his regular doctor did so, he heard some interesting sounds. The first was fluid in his right lung, an obvious sign of pneumonia. The second was something about his heart. He wasn’t entirely sure what the problem was, so he sent Dad to get a CAT scan right away.

My understanding is that when he got that CAT scan, he became one of the only (if not the only) patient who’s been admitted into the hospital immediately after his scan. They shipped him via ambulance to another hospital that specializes in cardiac treatment. It’s where he had his first open-heart surgery; it ended up being where he had his second as well.

They kept him for about a week, doing all sorts of scans and tests, injecting fluids and withdrawing blood, poking at him with stethoscopes… they did a lot. When looking at the overall results, they saw that both his aortic valve and mitral valve were leaking. They’d pump blood out, but some would wash back in. The mitral valve wasn’t too bad, but the damage to the aortic valve was officially “severe”.

What’s more, they detected some vegetation near the aortic valve, which could signal a bacterial infection. If that was the case, the bacteria could break away at any point, wash into his blood stream and infect God knows what other parts of his body. Much like the valve itself, they couldn’t just leave it sitting there

Most of the doctors thought he’d need to have his aortic valve replaced (again) within the next few months, a decade less than the 15-20 years we expected from the first replacement valve. One doctor thought the damage looked really old and recommended antibiotics for 40 days to get rid of the vegetation, then they’d take another look. If Dad had been okay for this long with a leaky heart, maybe he wouldn’t need surgery at all.

Continue reading “All things considered, Dad’s doing okay.”

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You can read me like a closed book.

Which, roughly translated, means “not at all.” I made a comment on December 2nd about how it’s been a long last couple days and I do plan on writing about them, just not tonight. Today felt pretty long as well and I have no idea how long the story will take to write, so I’m going to put it to the side for now and try to fill in the details tomorrow. Or the next day. Sometime over the weekend. I’ll get it done, promise.

When thinking about the upcoming entry, I remembered a paper I wrote for my Leadership course in the Augsburg MBA program. It’s called “Reflection paper, Part II”, which I felt was quite clever and original. But I read through it again and decided to pull out a couple paragraphs for people that resonate more for me now than they did while taking the class.

“I feel comfortable working with other people, but when it comes to showing confusion or vulnerability, I try to glaze over the subject or ignore it altogether. In my mind, it’s so I don’t upset other people, but according to Cashman, it’s a weakness in self-leadership. Leadership from the Inside Out and I’m stuck in the basement.

“I was thinking about a story earlier for some reason and it didn’t strike me as being relevant to this paper until I started writing it. (If it was in the reading material, I couldn’t find it.) There was a person who had some incurable disease and was slowly dying, but didn’t want to bother anyone by talking about it. Most people didn’t know there was a problem until she died and some of them were furious with her afterward. Why? Because she wasn’t willing to share. They were her friends, but she refused to let them act as friends because of her personal discomfort with talking about her illness.”

To assuage people’s potential concerns, there are no incurable diseases involved here, but there is that sense of not wanting to bother people. I know that opening up should enable closer relationships, but there’s still a tiny little voice in my head that interprets “opening up” as “asking for pity.”

Anyway! Like I said, I’ve had some long days recently and I’m tired. It’s just past 8:00pm and I’m tired. For someone who occasionally stays awake until the sun comes up in the morning, that’s pretty sad. And so now I’m thinking it’s about time to change into my jammies, curl up under the covers and pity myself to sleep.

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It’s expensive being a free spirit.

I would have liked to make this a longer entry, but spending the night at a hotel while my laptop is sitting at home, wistfully waiting for my return… not gonna happen. Using my phone to write this could completely bastardize my spelling and grammar (not that I make a point to use proper grammar in the first place), so I might as well limit the suffering for all parties involved.

That said, for those of you driving in the sleet/snow mix that’s going to be freezing overnight, be careful. Lakeville has tried adding a stoplight to the concrete section of a divided highway’s intersection. My mom and I drove by that spot this morning, saw some skid marks in the snow and an annoyed city worker told us it had been smashed into “about fifty pieces.” For the second time since they tried installing it. So be careful, okay?

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Did you find that in a baby-naming book?

I was in the checkout line at a local Target tonight and noticed that the clerk had a very large tattoo on her right shoulder. I initially noticed it because of its size, vibrant colors and intricate details. Then I looked closer.

It was an angel with all sorts of decorations around the outside and a ribbon at the bottom with a name. That name… was Joesph. That’s right, it was spelled Joesph: J-O-E-S-P-H. So I’m guessing that either someone got way too creative when naming their child or this woman’s tattoo artist was way too focused on the vibrant colors and intricate details to bother with checking his spelling.

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So much for PerBloWriMo…

Yesterday, I was thinking about writing a blog entry every day in December. I missed the official “National Blog Writing Month” in November, but screw it, I’ve always been a free spirit anyway.

That was yesterday and you may note the distinct lack of a blog entry. It’s been a long past couple days and I may write about them later, but suffice it to say that I’ll try not to skip any more. I’ve got plenty of stories to tell. Back in November, I wrote about opening night of Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations. Well, there were eight more performances and it was a memorable run overall. I guess this is one of those “I’ve been meaning to write some of this stuff and I’ll get around to it eventually.”

Now I’m getting around to it. But if I don’t, if I miss another day or two this month, I’ll probably use “always been a free spirit” as a cover story again.

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Opening night draws first blood!

I know one of my lines is talking about being bitten by a snake, but it almost feels like some of us have been snakebit for real. If things continue the way they’re going so far, I’m hoping we won’t be missing any limbs by the time we finish the production.

I’m not sure where things got jinxed, but it started for me last Saturday while working on the choreography for Scrooge. We were all divided into three groups of four (we now have the proper male/female ratio for dancing in the background). At one point, each group was spinning in a circle ala ring-around-the-rosie and our little group… we may have been spinning a bit too fast. And the room was a bit too small. And we got a bit too close to one of the circles next to us.

In the middle of spinning around, I felt my left foot stop. Well, the inner half of it stopped. The outer half tried to keep going. I immediately let go of people’s hands and limped toward the side of the room. Feeling all of those little bones in your foot spreading out when they’re supposed to be closely connected is… unpleasant. Plus it kinda hurts. I was done dancing after that.

The bottom part of my ankle and my foot around it have been pretty tender since then. It’s not bad enough that I can’t stand or walk around, but it’s tender. I didn’t want to give any sort of self-diagnosis, but I decided that it’s officially a sprained ankle/foot when I looked at the outside of my foot yesterday and saw a bruise had formed below my ankle bone. I did some damage to the ligaments, they started bleeding, it eventually pooled into part of my foot that hadn’t experienced any direct trauma.

That in itself wasn’t a big deal. I bought myself an ankle brace when I drove home on Saturday and I’ve been wearing it off and on since then. It’s always on when I’ve been onstage for Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations.

There’s a scene where Joe, our lead actor, chases me around the room. That wasn’t a big deal last week, but a sprained ankle tends to limit one’s range of motion. But it got better! Or worse, depending on your perspective!

During the course of that scene, Joe was supposed to crawl over the back of a couch while chasing me, fall on the floor, then get up and resume the chase. They put some kind of padding behind the couch for him to land on, but it wasn’t as effective as they would have liked. Right after rehearsal that night, he drove himself to the emergency room and the x-rays revealed a newly-broken bone. We’re not sure if it’s his collarbone or his shoulder, but suffice it to say that his range of motion is really limited.

But the show must go on! We’re trying to keep him from moving his right arm too much, no one’s putting any pressure on that shoulder, someone is ripping off his clothing between scenes… that’s not a recreational thing, he really is supposed to be wearing different outfits during each scene in the first act.

Then there was the chase scene last night. Opening night. The first show with an audience that paid to get into the theater. And I ended up bleeding onstage.

The problem is that at one point, I’m sitting in a chair yelling at Joe. He turns and lunges at my left side. It’s a chair with large arms, so I can’t roll off to the side—the only way I can think of to escape is by lunging out onto the floor toward the right. In doing so, I don’t just land and stay there, of course. I skid a little.

There’s one spot on my right knee that’s felt a little raw during rehearsals the last week, but this was the first time I sat down and noticed some little dark spots in my pants where I’d bled through the fabric. Then when I got offstage, people pointed out that I had skinned my right elbow and had blood showing there as well. Translation: I need to figure out a better way to land when I throw myself out of the chair or I’m going to run out of layers of skin by the third weekend.

Aside from all of that, things have been going pretty smoothly. If something happens to make them go less smoothly, we could have a problem. After all, if I’m out of commission, they’ll need to find a replacement male to do a ring-around-the-rosie in the background for Scrooge.