Day trip with Dad

The following is from a mass email I sent out after our trip to the Lubbock cardiologist. If you read that email, there's nothing new here :-) Hopefully, tomorrow's post will have news of how my projects did at the county fair. I hope to run out there sometime today to see.

I thank you all for your prayers and good thoughts! We made it home safely from Lubbock yesterday after a fairly uneventful day. Dad and I were on our own since the homemaker couldn't go with us. We had a bit of trouble obtaining a wheelchair when we first got there and I got my day's workout going from one end of the hospital to the other looking for one. They were discharging patients and all the wheelchairs were in use! Can you imagine? Glad for all those folks going home, but you'd think they would let us have a chair after someone was loaded into their car! NO! I kept hearing, "this is MY wheechair and I have to get it back to MY department to wheel OUR patients!" Ok, I understand that, but they could've been a little bit nicer with the attitude. Can you tell I was a little bit irritated :-)? Anyway, I ran up to the cardiologist's office to let them know we were there, still waiting for a wheelchair, and they had one for me to use.

After getting Dad upstairs, I calmed down a bit. lol Of course, he had to go to the bathroom and since I have to help him, I wheeled him into the ladies' room (oh, and no toilet paper, sheesh!). We got that done and they called us in to see the doc.

After listening to his lungs and heart, the doc decided that yes, he does have some fluid at the base of both lungs. So, before he can prescribe more of the diuretic, he needed blood work to determine that his kidneys are not being compromised any further. And, he needed to check something called a BNP to see how bad the congestive heart failure is. I hope to find out all that today.

The neatest thing about the whole trip was when they sat Dad down and proceeded to obtain information in the memory of his pacemaker/defibrillator! It was all printed out, deleted from the pacemaker memory to start collecting information all over again, and then the technician did some "upgrading". He tweaked some numbers on the computer screen and pronounced the devices to be working even better than when they were installed! Amazing! Thank You, Lord! So, now we are just waiting on what to do to get the lungs fluid-free again.

Thanks for listening and for praying! I could "feel" the cloak of prayer all around us almost as soon as we started out from the house.