My 83-year-old father, Harold Ridgeway, was brought to the emergency room on September 11, 2003 with nausea and abdominal pain. After 4 hours of examination and increasing back pain, my brother approached the emergency room doctor to mention that there was back pain accompanying his abdominal pain. The doctor informed us that he was unaware of the abdominal pain. Apparently, my father had only mentioned the nausea.
The doctor said, "Just for paranoia sake, lets do a CAT scan to check for an abdominal aneurysm." Well, 20 minutes later, along came his results accompanied by an entire surgical team. He had a 9½-cm. aneurysm that had ruptured. His chance of surviving this surgery was not good.
Three and a half hours later, the doctors came to speak to my brother and I. They informed us that he had tolerated the surgery quite well, but was definitively not out of the dark. In the next few days, as he started to wake up, he was struggling tremendously. Which to us was very frightening, but a good sign to the medical staff. He was doing well with everything except his lungs. He smoked up until 76 years of age. We were quite obsessed with the ventilator. Finally on the seventh day, they removed the ventilator. What a relief! Finally, a chance to communicate. He was doing wonderfully. His mind was sharp as ever!
After nine days in Intensive Care and eleven days in Special Care, he was moved to a Rehabilitation facility for ten days. He came home on October 12th. He is doing well. He totally does not understand the severity of the surgery. Therefore, he gets disgusted at his slow recovery. But all in all after reading all these postings, we are very blessed to have him home and well.
I want to thank everybody who has posted on this site. People who posted good news, for the hope you have given me and people who have posted bad news to help me cope with our minor setbacks and appreciate what we do have. God Bless.