Well, it has been a wild ride – week !!!!!
After Charles was added to the transplant list in March 2007, we started the long wait – then estimated at a year to eighteen months – right on the money.
On 2 April, He was admitted to the hospital with seriously deteriorating vital signs and a viral infection. They quickly him sorted with diet and meds and then we moved into hotel mode. His room became a typical teenaged boy’s: guitar poster (hospital supplied), guitar, guitar stand, laptop, ipod, and mobile phone. His thumbs will take on most people at text messaging. The downside was that his school sent in work and the hospital supplied a teacher and a mathematics tutor. He even used the hospital’s recording equipment to record his music class assignments and the sent the recording to his school for evaluation.
During the last year, Mrs A and I have travelled extensively, hoping, with his concurrence, that Murphy would do his worst / best. Not to happen.
Last Wednesday we had supper with him on our way to the opera. He was in great spirits and we even joked that the latest optimal date would be 10 June, as the expected hospital stay of 17 days would take him past the end of school.
In the lobby, ten minutes to curtain, his ring tone goes off in my pocket. I initially thought that I had forgotten something at the hospital or that he wanted me to bring in something the next day. “Dad, there is some one on life support that is a match and we will know in a couple of hours if I can have the heart.” (He is type O- , which puts him in only seven percent of the Canadian population) OK, I said, I will call you at the interval. (I knew that there was mobile reception in the hall.)
Called at the interval and it is, “Dad, I have to be ready for surgery by midnight.” We did not stay for the second act.
Mrs A and I had been from the Southern Cone of South America to Russia in the last year and where the f
was Murphy? We were five blocks away when the call came. We live 83 kilometres from the hospital.
It turned out to be a very long night. Midnight became 01:00 etc. He left his room at 05:00 and entered the operating room at 07:00. His new heart arrived in the OR at 06:35.
Eight hours after he started, the surgeon came out to tell us that what he had done was successful and the new heart was beating strongly. Charles would be in the OR for another two hours while thy tried to control his bleeding (normal) and stitch him up. There were eighteen staff required at various stages of his operation.
Thursday night. What a wonderful sight in the Critical Care Unit: tape across his face holding in his breathing tube; IV poles holding eleven IV lines feeding four IV tubes. Three CRT monitors measuring just about everything in brilliant technicolour; but only one mattered, the orange one booming out a beautiful, perfect heart beat.
I must confess: then 198 cm and 108 kilos finally cried.
His progression has exceeded the staff expectations. In the last five days he has gone from having all of this ‘stuff’ doing its thing to having everything save an IV tube removed and sitting, walking, and succeeding in his bodily functions. IVs, gone; breathing tube, gone; chest (blood) drainage tubes, gone; implanted defribulator electrodes, gone. He is still feeling pretty bloody awful but that should be expected six days post-op.
If all continues to go well he will be released from the hospital on Saturday – nine days post-op, close to a record. He was pretty determined to be out in the shortest time possible and it looks as if he might make it.