So, yes. It’s been a while since I updated this thing. Truth be told, I just don’t feel like looking at a computer screen after I get home from work. Don’t feel like doing much at all, honestly. Free time is a luxury these days, with the relatively long commute to and from the office and the little projects around the house that never seem to go away. So I wake up, I do or don’t take a walk, I drive to work, I work, I drive home, and I generally go to bed. On the weekends, I flip a coin to decide whether to stay home and accomplish something (or sleep) or to go out and not accomplish anything.
On this fine Saturday morning, I haven’t flipped the coin yet. Instead, I pulled out the laptop, paid some bills, did a little administrative work on my football website, and decided to add a new post to this story of my mid-life.
Today’s featured photo is of the mess that is called “the network closet” at the J. D. Frost CPA firm in Chattanooga. That closet and that firm is where I kicked off the month of June by onboarding them during the week of Memorial Day. The week went extremely well (hey, I was the lead on the project – a first for me – and I expected it to go well) and one other X-Company employee and I got the firm set up and working pretty much on the first day. The rest of the week was spent fixing little problems that popped up (the same stuff we’d normally do over the phone for clients) and getting to know the 30-some CPAs in the office. Great group of people, by the way – even though a bunch of them were UTC grads.
I stayed at the Read House on Market Street in Chatty, which I would’ve thought would be a lot nicer, considering how much it costs to stay there. No refrigerator or microwave in the room. No free breakfast (not even coffee, except for the little in-room coffee maker). Small room with a view of an alley behind a parking deck. Tattered carpeting in the halls. They say that they’re doing a $25 million restoration until this summer, so maybe I should look again in the fall. As it is….well…kind of a dump.
The hotel was about two miles from the office. Two miles DOWNHILL from the office. I know this because I walked to the office every morning and got to really hate that hill. Also got rained on pretty much every day. The rain, however, did little to bring the temperature down; so in addition to walking up that two-mile-long hill every morning (and back down every evening), I generally had to wear my North Face rain gear and a Tilly hat in the sauna that was Chattanooga in the rain. Didn’t enjoy that a lot. I did find a good pizza place though: Community Pie.
The Friday night that I got back from that job, I hosted Dianne and one of her friends at the house. They’d come down to run a 5K race in Atlanta to raise money for the aquarium or something. Good to see her, although I really have to question her sanity. Who wants to run in the Atlanta heat?
We had a post-race meal with Jenny and her father at Mad Italian, during which I got the details on a trip that Jenny was taking to London the next week (last week). When she does things like that, I’m supposed to feed her cats and occasionally check in with Herb to make sure he hasn’t fallen down his stairs or something crazy like that. I’ve only actually done that a couple of times, and both times he’s kind of laughed at me, which I can understand.
So Jenny texted me last Saturday afternoon about something (I think I’d sent her pictures of her cats) and asked if I’d called her dad yet. I said, “Not yet,” and didn’t think much of it.
Got a text from Jenny on Tuesday morning of this past week that said, “Call me. Dad’s in the hospital.” Also got a voice mail from Herb’s neighbor. Herb had fallen down the stairs. On Saturday afternoon. And had lain there, literally in a pool of his own blood, until 11AM Tuesday morning.
Needless to say, I felt like the world’s biggest horse’s ass for not calling to check on him over the weekend; but after considering it, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that if I’d called and he didn’t answer, I’d have left a message and not really worried about it. I don’t have a key to his house or anything. I may have called again and – perhaps – have driven over to the house if I hadn’t heard back from him by Sunday. I honestly don’t know.
What I know now, though, is that Herb has a fractured skull, a broken wrist, a bit of pneumonia, a slight brain bleed, and is eating through a feeding tube since his epiglottis isn’t working normally (possibly because when he arrived at the ER on Tuesday, he was understandably incredibly dehydrated and malnourished).
He spent Tuesday through Thursday in the ICU before moving to a regular hospital bed Thursday night. Doug flew in from California early Wednesday morning, and Jenny cut her London trip short and came back Wednesday evening.
The good news is that his physical improvement since I first saw him in the ER on Tuesday morning is incredible. His right eye had been completely swollen shut, but is now looking almost normal. His speech, which had been slurred and often confused (he wasn’t able to distinguish between reality and the hallucinations that he’d been having since Saturday afternoon) is pretty much back to normal, although he’s obviously tired and was still a bit taciturn when I went to check in on him yesterday morning. His wrist will not require surgery, nor will his skull.
The somewhat “iffy” news is that his throat still isn’t working properly and he can’t really swallow, so the feeding tube remains in place and doctors yesterday were talking about surgically implanting a stomach plug so that he can get nutrition that way. One doctor apparently said that “he doesn’t have an epiglottis,” which sounds like a load of hooey to me. The man is 85 years old. If he didn’t have an epiglottis, I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have been hospitalized about 100 times for pneumonia before now, and someone during those times would’ve figured out that he’s been aspirating crap into his lungs since he was born.
More likely, his throat muscles atrophied for 4 days and he needs to learn how to swallow again, but assisted living places don’t like to (or can’t) take patients with feeding tubes, so the stomach plug is a quick way to discharge him. Of course, that would put an end to things like enjoying food (and wine, which he loves). Doug is gathering information and he and Herb and Jenny will decide how to proceed.
At any rate, he’s much better than he was on Tuesday and, though there is still much to be decided about where and how he’s going to live, live he will. That he managed to survive is, to me (and to the doctors and nurses that I met during the week) almost unbelievable.
Tough old bird indeed.