Dad’s had diabetes for a long time. For those of you not familiar with the disease, it’s most simply described as a failure to produce insulin (a discovery made right here in Accordion City),
which functions like a key to “unlock” the energy stored in
carbohydrates and sugar. Without insulin, you could eat your fill and
still be starving your body.
One of the side-effects of diabetes is that your organs will fail. In
Dad’s case, it was his kidneys. Luckily, his sister, my Auntie Beth,
kindly donated a kidney to him (kidneys are redundant systems — you
can live with just one).
Unfortunately, receiving a donated organ requires you to go on a
regimen of drugs that suppress your immune system. Without these drugs,
your immune system may start attacking the donated organ, mistaking it
for some kind of invasion. A suppressed immune system is essentially a
low-rent version of AIDS. Bacterial infections that would bounce off
most of us can make someone with such an affected immune system ill,
possibly fatally so.
Dad recently got an infection in his toe, and it just got progressively
worse. The whole foot’s no longer a pretty thing to look at, and the
infection’s making the rest of him feel ill. It was decided that either
some of the foor went, or he did. He was last-minute scheduled for
surgery last Sunday.
On Saturday, he noticed some numbness in his leg. Mom, who’s a pretty
observant doctor, gave him a quick checkup and noticed the signs of a
blood clot. She rushed him tot he hospital and the clot was removed.
However, over that period of time, his kidney was starved of blood and
wasn’t functioning at all. We’re currently waiting to see if they
kidney was just shocked by the lack of blood and on its way to
recovering, or whether it’s out of commission for good.
He had a couple of toes removed on Sunday — the thought of losing body
parts makes me cringe — and the doctors are waiting to see if they
have to remove more toes, or the foot, orf a bit of leg.
Dad was taking it as well as possible under the circumstances; he even
joked that he’d better not find his foot for sale at an antique shop.
He’s currently still in the ICU at St. Joe’s, and he’s sort
of fuzzy, drifiting in and out of consciousness. When he’s conscious,
he’s about as lucid as someone who’s just woken up. We’ve been able to
have conversations — he asks “How’s the job going? How was the wedding? How is your new girlfriend?”
For now, it’s a matter of waiting and seeing how his condition evolves.
His ICU nurse tells me that it’s good for him if there’s family in the
room, even if he’s not always conscious (apparently, it keeps him
better oriented), so I’ve been spending my evenings by his bedside with
my laptop getting work done and just being a smiling face whenever
needed. It’s the least I can do for a guy to whom I owe everything.
If you’ve got a spare prayer, wish, good thought or even a fung shui furniture move, could you please offer one for him?
