Waiting

A bit of a recurring theme on this blog has been my lack of patience and how much I hate waiting.  Waiting for service, waiting in a line, waiting for results or outcomes, waiting to see what the future holds; whatever it is, I hate waiting.

This is not a new condition for me.  It’s something that’s always been an issue.  When I was younger, my mother used to tell me that I needed to have patience.  I told her, “I have patience, I’m a pediatrician.  I have little patients.”  Shockingly, she never found this particularly amusing.  So it is not without some bit of irony that I am waiting now.  Waiting to see what the next few weeks hold in store for me.  Waiting to find out what I need to do, for my mother.

I wrote yesterday that my mother had been admitted to the hospital and was scheduled for an angioplasty this morning.  I was pretty worried about this until I came home from work and took the time to look up exactly what was entailed in an angioplasty.  After realizing that this was a “non-surgical” procedure and that she would not even be put under anesthesia, I was feeling much better.  I had no idea what the outcome would be.

My Sister called me at 9:00 this morning to inform me that the angioplasty had revealed one artery that is one hundred percent blocked and one that is ninety-five percent blocked and that they would be performing a double or triple bypass, “in a couple of hours.”

They took my mother into surgery around 1:30 Central time and spent an hour “extracting” the veins they would use for the bypass.  Then they began the bypass portion.  This is open heart surgery, with general anesthetic, intubation and stopping her heart.  The surgery is expected to last four hours, until around 7:00 Central time.  After surgery she’ll be taken into recovery for two hours and then ICU overnight.  I’ll have no idea what comes next until she’s out of ICU and coherent enough to talk.

It’s becoming apparent that my mother is going to need some looking after and there is no family in Tulsa, where she lives, to do it.  I am terribly dismayed by the idea of going to Tulsa to play nurse, but it will probably be necessary.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to know until I hear how things turned out and what my mother needs/wants to have happen…

So I wait.