For something a bit more serious. Ok, a lot more serious.
I normally post about the mundane daily ins and outs around here, but my dad has been very ill and I am having trouble consistently communicating with sweet friends and family via email and texts, so I am going to post updates here until he (hopefully and prayerfully) is better.
To catch everyone up, here's a brief rundown of what has happened:
Last Wednesday (Jan 25), my dad was throwing up in the early morning. He blacked out while throwing up, fell and hit his head on the tile floor and got some pretty serious gashes on his noggin. Apparently this happened at least two times, but my mom only heard that last one. She encouraged him to go to the ER to get stitches. He was resistant because he had a 7am dental appointment he didn't want to miss.
Around 5 am (2 hours after the fall), he finally decided that he did, indeed, need stitches.
They went to the ER and he got 24 staples in his head.
They did some xrays and ran some tests to make sure he had no internal bleeding. While he had no internal bleeding, they found that he had a blocked intestine caused by a hernia. This explains the vomiting. At first it sounded like he may or may not need surgery but after further tests, they got him into surgery rather quickly.
The surgery ended up being more extensive than they initially thought it would need to be.
Because this was unexpected surgery and because his intestine was blocked, he had some food in his system that had not yet been digested. They need to siphon out the stomach. They had difficulty doing this.
Because of this difficulty, that stuff aspirated into his lungs. This is bad.
Because of that, he was placed on a respirator. This aspiration of the fluid in the lungs caused pneumonia.
Because of the respirator and the discomfort it causes, he was heavily sedated. He is in ICU.
He has been heavily sedated since then (we are on day 7 of this). They have been trying to gradually reduce his oxygen levels on the respirator. They are trying to get him off of the respirator but his healing is taking much longer than expected.
He still has an usually large amount of congestion and fluids in his lungs.
The consistent status we get from the medical staff is "he is still the same and not making as much progress as we had hoped" and "we are going to let him rest today and try X tomorrow".
Today was the first day when he is not the same and seems to be getting worse. I will update on that in another blog post. I am hoping today was just an isolated "bad" day and that tomorrow will be better. I would be lying, though, if I said I wasn't pretty discouraged.
Your prayers are greatly appreciated.
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