Thank you one and all for your comments and encouragement.
A couple of comments....
David/Jespah.....You're right, amnesia after surgery is definately a possibity, and and problem. I could see how if you had no memory, you could very well be thinking "have I been abducted...am I dead....what's going on....who are these people, aliens?" etc etc. You can have all kinds of crazy thoughts, or depending on your live experiences, be reliving prior events.
When I went back, they had taken out the breathing tube already, I saw that right away. In the first hours, they have a nurse one on one with you in the room, right at beside, to monitor everything. Lordyaswas, if your mother was still alive, as a nurse she would certainly be amazed at the state of the art technology that is employed today. For us old geezers who can remember visiting grandma at the hospital back in the 70's, or in the hospital themselves, it's like a Brave New World today. Someone time traveling from back then would be in shock, like someone from the Middle Ages appearing here and seeing cars and electric lights. Better yet, you know that every year newer and better things come out.
In any event, yeah, when I got there I stood at the foot of the bed, and when Wally saw me, he tried to talk (Ack! Stop! Don't Talk!), but most importantly, I saw that flash of recognition in his eyes. Then his eyes immediately started blurring and tracking all over, so after a minute I asked "Do you want me to leave?" He kind of shakes his head, not sure if it was just random movement. "Do you want me to stay?" More emphatically Nods his head this time. "Do you want me to not talk?" VERY emphatically nods his head. So I sit down and he holds my hand until he seemed over wanting to hold my hand
. I turn to the nurse and ask her something, and he does this slightly Frankenstein hand waving "fire bad!" thing, like I shouldn't be talking. Then the nurse goes to answer me, and he does another, but more stern "FIRE BAD!!!!" hand wave. It was pretty funny actually.
Again, with the just being present thing, for the next hour he would mostly just be randomly staring or tracking his eyes around, but every so often he would quickly snap them over to where I was sitting. Like to remind himself where he was.
Unfortuanately, he has a really high drug tolerance, and they are giving him pretty much all they can. Hence, that means he's in more pain than I think most people would be, because the meds that would OD most people just keep the edge off for him. So it goes.
Glitterbag....You bring up excellent points as far as signs and symptoms of heart distress that we not take seriously, or just think it's part of something else.
In Wally's case, at first the docs and we thought he just had the crud that was going around. I mean, you display the same symptoms that a lot of other people are having at the same time, you're going to think it's the same thing.
In defense of the surgeon, probably my writing wasn't clear. It was the original cardiologist that did the angiogram that was a pompous douchebage asshat, not the surgeon who did the bypass. The surgeon was informative and talked to us like we were intelligent people, capable of making the right decisions when presented with full information.
Lordy, oh yeah, while I was there he wanted to sit up, and even with all the amazing technology surrounding him, there seemed to be a conundrum as to how to correctly get the bed into a chair like position. The problem was eventually solved, but not without him all the while using colorful language about various peoples mothers.
