Text blitz coming.
My father went into the hospital on Tuesday morning, very early, complaining about numbness in his hands, feet, and mouth. The numbness spread quickly until he was barely able to move and unable to talk. They ran a battery of tests on him to try and find out what it was. During a spinal tap Tuesday afternoon, he stopped breathing, though fortunately only for about thirty seconds. He is on a respirator and has been on one ever since.
The current thought is that he has a rapid onset of Guillian-Barre Syndrome, or very bad lyme disease. They’ve done a series of tests today to measure the fluid in his lungs, neural activity, check for brain damage, another spinal tap, and a few other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting. He hasn’t been conscious since sometime Tuesday, though that’s by design and antibiotics. They say he could be on the respirator for another few weeks as his muscles are all paralyzed and he’s unable to breathe on his own, his diaphragm just doesn’t work. He’ll be in the ICU for the foreseeable future.
He’s 56 years old and is in fantastic physical shape; until two years ago, his job was climbing radio communications towers. I spent a summer doing it and it’s crazy hard. But he’s also had three heart attacks, broke his leg in two places in a motorcycle accident, battled incredibly high blood pressure, fractured two vertebrae that never properly healed, and had a staph infection two months ago.
There are lots of reasons for optimism, especially with his conditioning, and hopefully that will outweigh the respirator and his age factor when the recovery chances are calculated.
This is all happening in Smalltown, Virginia. I live in Kansas City. If I were there, I would just be sitting by the hospital bed freaking out, instead of sitting here in KC freaking out and trying not to. My mother, who is there, has told me not to try and come until they know more about the diagnosis and when my father will be aware that I’m there, because right now he doesn’t know a thing that’s happening, which is probably for the best. She’s right, especially since the closest I can fly in is two hours away so driving would be better and more cost-effective, but also a two-day 15-hour drive.
The doctors have said that if he wasn’t in the hospital when he was, he would probably be dead now. I don’t know how to process that information. It doesn’t seem real.
Just got a text message from my mother, as I write this, that he has pneumonia in one lung but they are treating it.
I can’t do anything. Were I there, I couldn’t do anything. I want there to be something I can do. I don’t want to be powerless or helpless. But I am. And I can’t even imagine what it was like for him to be completely paralyzed, unable to speak or communicate in any way, but still aware. I can’t think of much more terrifying than that.
