Blogging Ottinger (tim)Tough Old Bird on the Mend.
My father-in-law, Jim, is one tough old bird. I know that his history is pretty remarkable, how he taught himself so that he could pass the GED after having less than one year of schooling. I know that the whole SeaBees thing is pretty cool, and that he was a pro wrestler and is one amazing pastry chef and bread maker. The guy has lived through a lot. He’s a pretty good fellow.
He’s recently been through a knee replacement. He’s not been able to walk much for quite a while. He is a larger man and has no cartilage left in either knee. It kept getting worse and worse, and he was less happy and less mobile by the day. Finally (with some encouragement from my medical buddy!) he opted for knee replacement. When he went in for pre-surgery evaluation, they find that he’s had a heart attack he didn’t know about. They schedule some heart cath to assess the situation, and it turns out his heart has already done the bypass (rerouting around the blockage) and he’ll be ready for surgery very soon. Well, I thought he had a pretty good heart, though I meant it figuratively.
He goes through the surgery just fine, comes out like a champ. However, he’d been having back pain for a long time and had been relying on home remedies and over-the-counter medicines and didn’t realize it was more serious. He was having kidney failure. He came through a heart attack and a knee replacement with that going on. Well, it looked pretty bad for the fellow, but they forced fluids and meds and the kidneys resumed function. They’re getting back to normal now, and the pain is fading day by day. It’s been a week or two.
Now he’s almost over the back pain from the kidneys, and he’s feeling less pain from the replacement than he was from the bad knee before. His heart is functioning, and he’s even gotten up and done some walking (though he keeps the walker handy just in case).
I think he’s going to be okay. Frankly, I don’t know what it would take to stop him!!!
