Category: It Happened to Me

I’ve posted the first set of photos from the trip to Canmore I recently took with The Redhead. Here’s a sample:

The rest of the photos are in my Canmore photo album.

Friday’s night’s hanging out at bedside with Dad was a pretty quiet

affair — it was just me and him in a darkened room in the Intensive

Care Unit of St. Joseph’s. He slept most of the time, while I quietly did some light reading (really, it’s one of the simplest techie books of all time).

Saturday’s visit was completely different. I arrived in the afternoon

to find the room filled with people: Mom, my sister Eileen, my Aunt

Beth, who’d flown in from the Philippines the day before, and Letty, a

friend of the family. Dad’s bed was set so that he could sit upright,

and Eileen was spooning him some soup. He asked for some hot chocolate.

He seemed better, even making his usual observational and irreverent

wisecracks.

Someone mentioned that Aunt Beth (who is one of Dad’s younger sisters)

is Dad’s guardian angel. Every time his health takes a turn for the

worse, she comes over, and within a day or two, he gets better. Kudos

to her for leaving Manila (where the weather seems pretty nice right now) for Toronto, where we’ve been enduring temperatures of -25 degrees C

(-13 degrees F). Perhaps her visit, combined with some antibiotics, and

the removal of a blood clot and a couple of infected, unsalavageable

toes, made the difference.

I’m sure your kind words and prayers also helped. Thanks to everyone who wrote in via comments and email. You’re great people.

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?