almost done with the hospital

Today, Thursday, was a good day. Mostly Dad hung out at North Collier Hospital and got transferred out of the ICU and into a normal room.  Tomorrow he'll have an endoscopy and be released either tomorrow afternoon (Friday) or the next day (Saturday) mostly depending on how strong he feels (I think). And assuming they don't find much of anything in his GI tract.

The major work today was trying to make sense of all the input from the six different doctors who have had a hand in the case. The intake person, the first cardiologist, the second cardiologist the cardiologist who did the cardiac catheter, the GI person, the critical care person, and a couple more. None of them entirely communicating with the others and each with a narrow focus. It was fantastically helpful having Joel there, not because anything was so difficult to understand but because the communication got ratcheted to a higher level.

Anyhow, I'll let everyone know about the endoscopy results tomorrow night, and hopefully this blog will end when the hospital stay is over.  Joel said that Howie (his friend from  Union, the cardiologist) suggested that it was possible that no heart attack had occurred at all--that it was possible for enzyme levels to be slightly elevated without any heart event. We're going to check the EKG and he's going to research that further, and I'll report on that as well. But maybe this whole episode is totally GI. In any event, the catheter showed that his heart is in great shape (as I mentioned before) so it's all pretty good news.