Gloria and the Hospital
That sounds like the name of a bad child’s book about life insurance rates and scary surgeons. A couple of times yesterday, I made off hand comments about being up at the hospital, and later I realized that I never said anything about WHY I was up there. I know it made a couple of people worry, so I thought I’d come back and explain.
My stepmother Gloria went to the doctor for chest pains on the 10th. After some testing, they scheduled some further in-depth tests up in cardiology at the hospital for Tuesday the 14th. They let her go home after the tests, but we found out later that if the right person had seen the results before she left, she probably would have gone straight upstairs then. Instead, she went back for a consultation on Thursday, and then a procedure on Friday. They were going to get a better look at her heart, and try to put stints in, but that was a no-go, so they scheduled a bypass for first thing this morning, and she stayed in the hospital on a Nitro drip for the weekend. She had 3 blockages, one of them almost complete.
She’s out of surgery now, and ended up with a quadruple bypass. From what Dad told me, almost 2 hours ago now, everything went very well in surgery. They did move from an intended triple to a quadruple, but as soon as they were done, her heart rate returned to normal. That’s compared to about half that before they started. If I understood correctly, their only concern was how well she’ll come off the respirator due to the condition of her lungs from being a smoker. She’ll be in the ICU until she’s off the respirator, somewhere between 24-48 hours from now. Then they’ll move her back up to the Heart and Vascular unit while she continues to recover.
So it was kind of scary for awhile there, but everything sounds very promising right now!
