This week my 71-year-old mother has had a TAVR procedure. The hospital where this was done is 70 miles from where we live. (We have one here in town, but it's way too small to be doing things like cardiac surgery.) I've been doing all the driving.

In order to get this operation accomplished, she had to be at the hospital at 9 AM on the day before to have some final labs done and receive detailed instructions. They then sent her home...

... with instructions to present herself in the Cardiology department at five-thirty the following morning.

Please bear in mind that as a consequence of the severe aortic stenosis this procedure is intended to treat, she's been having a hard time getting herself out of bed before, say, 3 PM of late, and I'm generally not up much before noon myself. Getting up at seven so she could make the nine o'clock preliminaries was bad enough, but to make the surgical appointment we would have to leave no later than FOUR IN THE MORNING.

What I'm saying is, at 3:30 AM, I'm usually thinking Crap, I should have made more of an effort to get to bed by now, not It's time to make the donuts.

There followed many hours of sitting around in the hospital, first in the Cardiology waiting room, then in the patient cubicle where they sent her to recover, then in the "proper" hospital room they moved her to for the requisite overnight observation. I left the hospital about five o'clock yesterday afternoon, 13 hours into a day that started two hours before sunrise, and don't really remember most of the 70-mile drive home, which is probably not a good sign.

Then I went back today to pick her up and bring her home, which wasn't particularly arduous apart from the bit where they called and told me they'd be releasing her in about an hour, and then released her in five hours. But at least I was sitting in my vehicle in the parking lot rather than inside the hospital. Yes, I would rather do that. The only downside is the absence of vending machines.

Now, I'm not for a moment saying I have it worse than Mom does. She had a freaking heart valve replaced, and they beat the hell out of her to do it. Oddly, the method they used isn't even mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the procedure linked above; it involved catheters in no fewer than three arteries (femoral, radial, and carotid) and more IVs than you'd find on the scene of the average motorcycle accident. Part of the delay in releasing her was because stopping up all the leaks in the plumbing they caused in the process took longer than expected and, to hear her tell it, turned into kind of a sanguinary variant on Whac-a-Mole for a few minutes there.

I am saying that I've gotten up at weird, weird hours the past three days, completely skewed the usual schedule of my meals and the accompanying medications, and driven more than 420 miles in that period, and I'm vaguely amazed that nothing shorted out and Captain Cavemanned me into Unintentional Failure of Filial Obligations at any point during the odyssey.

Holy fuck, I'm tired.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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