Jackpine Update [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

First, I want to express my gratitude to all you great folks for your kind, generous, compassionate, and often delightfully funny outpourings on my post of yesterday morning, as well as for the various PM's I got from loving and concerned DUers.. Here's the link to that thread.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024458859

The day was filled with being carted around & I didn't have much time or energy to be online at all or to make the appropriate responses inside that thread, so I got to read through the entire thing in these early morning hours after being awoken at 3 and 4:30 am for my vitals to be taken, and knowing that it would be useless to try to get back to sleep because I could be woken again at any moment for another blood draw.

Anyway, since I got to read about 24 hours worth of the whole thread, I was struck by how great everyone on this board is. I should have known, of course--and on a sort of theoretical level I did know, but it really came home to me as I read through all those wonderful posts. Democrats/liberals/progressives/democratic socialists are good people. All those traits I mentioned in the opening line come naturally to them. It's a tribe that I take great pride in belonging to.

And now the update. I may be getting discharged today. My hospitalist physician said that according to his reading, the stress test did not indicate the need to do an angiogram, plasty or bypass. There is significant heart damage from at least two previous (and euphemistically named) "events," but coronary blockage does not seem to be playing a role in the ongoing situation. The hospitalist did add the caveat that he is speaking as a generalist, and was unwilling to fully commit to his interpretation of the results until they are reviewed by a cardiologist, which is supposed to happen sometime today.

On another front, though, my dear wife, who has cancelled her counseling client sessions to be with me as much as possible, developed an oral/jaw pain that forced her to go to the dentist yesterday. She got a root canal, and then came to the hospital to be with me.

As the Novocain from the dental procedure wore off, she became very painfully aware that there was still a huge amount of pain. Tongue and finger explorations have convinced her that the tooth that received the root canal is no longer a source of pain, but that the culprit is an adjacent tooth. She will be trying to get in to the dentist today for another root canal.

Folks, it doesn't rain but that it pours. Now I'm lying here thinking of what must have been a horrible night for her, and wondering if she was able to contact the dentist. Our dentist is the kind of guy who will come in on a weekend to treat a patient in acute pain, so her best bet is to try him before coming in to the emergency room here in order to get an appointment with the on-call dentist. I know that she has some Tylenol 3, enough to help her somewhat through the night, but Migod this is being a rough year.