Rollercoaster

Ritesh's dad is still in the hospital, still in intensive/cardiac care. There was some improvement last week - in fact, on Thursday, things looked great. He had been weaned of most of the medications and could communicate by nodding his head yes or no and by blinking his eyes in response to letters of the alphabet, thus creating words. He wanted to know what had happened to him and where he was. He was emotional but lucid and seemed to progress well. Doctors were confident they would be able to remove the respirator. "A no brainer" the pulmonologist said, "we'll take him off". They would remove the aortic balloon pump that helps his heart the day after the ventilator, and then move him out of the ICU straight into cardiac rehab. He would be able to talk and walk and come home soon. Our relief was palpable - this ordeal was finally going to be over, and a huge weight was lifted. We joked with dad in the ICU, and giddily told jokes and made plans and giggled in the waiting room. I bailed out of work early that day and spent a small fortune on thank you cards and chocolates and macarons for the 7 nurses and 4 doctors who had been taking care of him, and we felt so celebratory that we polished off a whole box of macarons ourselves, right there in the hospital waiting room.

The next day, Friday, he was indeed taken off the respirator and seemed to be doing well. I decided to make cupcakes to celebrate. Valentine's Day was coming up on Saturday, and while I resent the marketing/retail onslaught of that day as much as the next person, I felt sentimental this year. Ritesh had been spending the night down in Anaheim pretty much every night since the heart attack and although I commuted down there on most days, it was hard on us and I missed him very much. With everything he's gone through this week, I figured the least I could do was to finally make him some banana dessert. So I made banana custard cupcakes, with a chocolate-coffee-liqueur glaze and some salted caramel and extra fleur-de-sel on top:

They were good and Ritesh was happy. However, by the time I got down to Anaheim, pops was already not breathing very well. He was struggling to get enough oxygen, and it got worse throughout the evening in spite of an assortment of oxygen masks they tried on him. In the end, he went into respiratory distress and had to be put back on the respirator around midnight, along with the heavy sedation (to help him stand that tube down his throat) and the blood pressure meds. "We're back to square one", the nurse said.

The weekend has been one of waiting and stressing out over the new diagnosis of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, which sounds very frightening if you look it up on wikipedia. We won't know until later today what the doctors have to say and what the prognosis is, if there is one.