First of all, this is not my wife squeezing one out in a bed pan. But I was looking for a public domain picture on health care and nursing and this one came up. So I thought I'd use it.
A lot of people have been asking about Cindy and my friend, Dave Heusmann, and how they're getting along since their respective appendectomy and heart attack from last weekend.
Cindy has been home all week resting about as comfortably as possible. She finally had a full night's sleep last night. The previous three nights, she was up with pain in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep. She was sleeping during the day time and I've been trying to get her to stay up through the day so she can get a full night's sleep. The only problem is that she slept well past 10 a.m. this morning.
She wanted to go out to get something to eat last night, so we went over to Rock Island and got a calzone at Huckleberry's. Her appetite is coming back and she's looking more well every day. But she's still sore. She's hoping to go back to work part time on Monday.
Regarding Dave - they did an angioplasty on him on Monday, placing a stent in an artery that was 90% blocked. His other two arteries were 35% blocked - not enough to do anything to, but they were going to monitor him in the coming months. He was released out of the hospital on Tuesday and promptly went to the Wig and Pen in Coralville to get what he told Scott Schroeder was "some real food."
I talked to Dave on Wednesday morning and he was sitting on his deck having a cup of coffee. He said, "Honestly, I don't feel any different than I did last Friday morning. I would have never guessed that I was going to have a heart attack that night."
He said that he has no dietary restrictions (hell, he was drinking COFFEE!), and he's supposed to take it easy for a couple of weeks. He joked, "Gee, if I would have known this is all it would have taken to get a couple of weeks off work, I would have done this a long time ago!"
Dave's family doctor had put him on a diet and told him to cut his cholesterol about a year or so ago. Like I said, Dave looked to be in great shape before he lost the 25 pounds. He said, "I sort of wondered if all the stuff I did was worth it. But then talking with other people, losing that weight and changing my diet may not have prevented the heart attack, but it may have softened the severity of it."
Cindy is still pretty puffed up around her stomach. She's not certain she can wear slacks or shorts when she goes back to work. She's hoping the swelling will go down in the next couple of days. I'm hoping to keep her active because I've noticed the more she sits around, the more she's hurting.
Through all of this, I have heard a fair share of appendectomy stories from a number of people. Many of them are complete horror stories. My mother-in-law told me about when they opened her up 15 years ago to take her appendix out and found an orange-sized cyst on some female plumbing. My sister reminded me of the time my nephew got his appendix out 10 years ago, only he had been mis-diagnosed three or four times prior to them discovering it was the appendix.
Bob Kelly, from Wicked Liz and the Bellyswirls, relayed a story about how his brother, Leo, had an appendectomy only after they figured out that he wasn't severely hungover. And Bobby told another story of a Japanese friend who had to undergo an emergency appendectomy four hours after he first came to America a few years ago.
I've heard from two or three people who had either had emergency appendectomies while on vacation, or who were with someone who had one. A Road Tips reader e-mailed me with a story of how her brother had to get an appendectomy the DAY of his WEDDING! She said, "They thought it was nerves at first, but it turned out much more than that." And a neighbor lady told me about her son going through a routine appendectomy a year or two ago, only to have it burst while they were extracting it. He ended up spending two weeks in the hospital.
All in all, the vast majority of people we've heard from regarding Cindy's appendectomy all say the same two things - It could have been a lot worse; and thankfully it didn't happen in Europe.
They're right. Compared to other stories I've heard, it could have been worse than what it was. And it could have been traumatic for her to have this happen to her in a foreign land.
Now, that's not an indictment of the European health system, by any means. I've also received replies and a couple e-mails with horror stories from people getting benefits denied for having procedures performed while in a foreign country. I guess that would be an indictment of the American health plan industry.
As I said before, I truly believe in the miracles of modern medicine. My wife and my buddy, Dave, are two more proofs positive that while health care costs continue to skyrocket across the country, with them both home and resting up just days after major procedures the miracles of modern medicine continue to amaze me.
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