Bad News

I’m going to be scarce this week. Yesterday my father went to hospital with what we’re not technically calling a heart attack (he has blocked arteries, but the “heart episode” didn’t result in damage to the heart muscle), and we’re currently waiting to find out when the bypass surgery is going to happen. Presumably it’ll be some time this week, after the blood thinners they gave him when he was first admitted have started to wear off.

All in all, none of this news is as bad as it could have been – my dad has been extraordinarily lucky given the circumstances, and open heart surgery has been around long enough that the bigger concern than “they’re cutting him open and messing with his ticker” is “how is all this going to interact with his Parkinson’s medication.” It helps that my sister is a radiographer with experience working with cardiac-style cases, so we have a fairly accurate barometer of how serious things are and how much worse they could have been. I, on the other hand, have irrational flashbacks to episodes of the Gilmore Girls in which not-a-heart-attack heart problems were a plot point, which is both totally inappropriate and oddly comforting at the same time.

I am going to be on the Gold Coast for the next week, for obvious reasons. I’ve tried to contact people and cancel all the things that need to be canceled, but I’m putting this up here as a safety net. If we’re meant to be catching up, or if I owe you an e-mail, or if you’re counting on me to do something for the next four or five days…well, it’s probably not happening. Much of my time is going to be spent at the hospital. The rest of my time will be spent working on Claw and doing the things that absolutely need to be done. Everything else has kind of dropped off the bottom of the list.