Poppa Update

It just amazes me - the outfits they come up with for babies! Look at this. Our newest Canadian Male Model is proud to present - the Elephant! This simply looks like a cute grey and white bodysuit - until you add the bib and presto........our young model becomes Elmer the Elephant. Adorable!

Now - about Poppa. He was feeling even worse by Sunday at supper time and decided he should go to Emergency and see if they could help him. We arrived - triage - registration - take a seat over there sir. Okay. Zipper (the car) is sitting outside the ER doors on the "ramp" as they call it, and he can't stay there. So I go out to move him. I park him just down the street a little distance and head back to the ER. When I get there Poppa is nowhere in sight...but the people there ahead of us are still waiting. That can't be good - right? Anyway, I have brought some knitting with me, so I take a seat and get out some nice sock yarn and start knitting. Along comes an orderlie who inquires about the knitting, so I inquire about Poppa. He goes away comes back, and says the doctor and nurse are with Poppa and I should keep knitting. About 1/2 an hour later a nurse sticks her head out from behind a door and calls me and says I can come in now. Poppa is lying prone, with an IV and little electrodes all stuck to him and a monitor saying his heart rate is 104 - oops - not good at all. Turns out he has been suffering from a heart arrythmia for the last four days - not the flu at all. Needless to say, this is much more serious. They have some drug going into him from the IV line and are waiting for it to take effect. So, we wait for just over an hour, while I chat and knit and watch the monitor. His heart rate is varying between 98 and 167...........not good! Twice, a nurse comes in and connects to his electrodes and does an ECG and goes away. Then the evening shift nurse comes in to introduce herself and observes that his HR is still too high - she'll tell the doctor. Shortly thereafter, the doctor comes in and decides that another medicine is needed..but first they will do a chest x-ray. Off he goes. When he gets back, the nurse comes in with two medications...an oral one and an IV one. She gives him the pill and then hooks him back up to the monitor.............which says he is perfect! Pulse steady at 78, oxygen saturation at 100%, respirations at 15-20...........perfect! So, she takes away the new IV meds, and the doctor comes back in and says we will wait a while to make sure the oral meds don't slow down his HR too much. Another hour plus goes by.........he's still perfect...........so they say he can go home. But, before we leave they schedule appointments for an echo-cardiogram and a 24-hour heart monitor - and give him a prescription for a drug which regulates his heart rate........kinda scare-ey! Poppa asked them why this happens (I should point out that about 9 years ago he had an episode of this which they deemed to be "not serious"). They said usually stress on his heart, which gets out of control and the heart doesn't know enough to slow back down. They told him it was like "faulty wiring" and the wrong signals were being sent to the node that tells his heart when and how to beat. This was traumatic for him, since he had to admit that he was less than perfect! Yikes - hard for an obsessive/compulsive perfectionist! (That is my own non-professional description of his personality - Hee!) In view of all the heavy, wet snow he had shovelled prior to this event, I can certainly understand that his heart was under a lot of stress.

So the bottom line is, he should be fine if he doesn't over-do - and he has to learn to slow down and not push himself beyond reasonable limits - and let the snow pile up a little or just do it in small doses............which is incredibly hard for my dear work-a-holic perfectionist. I have been trying to help with the snow. I can shovel - but the snowblower is a bit much for me. Hopefully, the results of all the tests do not show permanent damage - and the drug prevents another episode like this one! And - hopefully it will quit snowing for a couple of weeks until we leave for Florida?????