Wow. You post about something serious, and folks really come out for you… That last post has comments from pretty much the whole Toronto posse (aka “my homies from the Upper North Side”). Which reminds that I’m lousy at keeping in touch with people, and that I somehow have really good friends despite that. Thanks, people. When this is over, I’m hoping to be flying up to Toronto to spend some more time with my Dad, and I’ll have a lot of thanks-giving and catching up to do with you folks in person.
The latest update is mostly good news. We’d all been pretty scared the last few days, since my dad had been taken off all sedation, but wasn’t regaining consciousness. After around 48 hours, you start to worry (rationally or not) that he might be comatose, or that he might have had another stroke… The doctors didn’t appear *too* concerned (a CAT scan of his head came up clean, etc.), suggesting that it might just take a little while for him to wake up. They refer to this state, frighteningly enough, as a “semicoma”. But the good news part is that my dad regained consciousness yesterday – Rammy was at his bedside, and when he yelled “Aba!” (Hebrew for father), my dad opened his eyes for a few seconds. Eventually, he even responded to “Can you hear me?” with a nod of his head. He’s back to (mostly) sleeping now, but we’re all hugely relieved by this direct evidence that “coma” and “semicoma” are indeed different, and that dad’s not actually in a coma.
Right now the doctors are mostly concerned with his temperature (he’s been running a fever almost continuously), which has been spiking up from “low enough not to worry about” to “high enough to worry about” at different intervals. They’re also looking closely at the pancreas itself, since it seems that in pancreatitis cases, “death after the first week is usually caused by pancreatic infection or pancreatic pseudocyst.” Rammy tells me that they’ve decided to go ahead and drain the area of my dad’s abdomen surrounding the pancreas, since it’s likely to be holding a significant volume of caustic and/or infectious fluid, and there may be a mass forming (pseudocyst or not) that could present additional risk. That’s bad news in a general sense, but good in the sense that a problem has been identified and a course of treatment (drainage) has begun. We’re hoping that the drainage, while fairly aggressive and (obviously) invasive, is the event that turns the tide in my dad’s recovery.
For more info than anyone-not-a-doctor would want on Acute Pancreatitis, see the relevant section of the Merck Manual online. Be forewarned that hypochondriacs (*cough*like Kathy*cough*) should probably stay AWAY from all known variants of the Merck Manual.
G’night, sweet people. I miss you all lots. Stay warm, okay?
