Wednesday, April 14, 2010

One of (another of) Those Days

Weds. can be a good day sometimes. I go to yoga in the morning, then teach, and go home, to a nice dinner... sometimes. But today was different. Though I went to yoga with Bob this morning (good class, wasn't it Liz?), and then on to class (not a bad class either), I had two difficult things (make that 3) to do... First, my student who is somewhat unbalanced was again troubled. Then the student who lost her fiance a month before the wedding came to class, after being out for 2 1/2 weeks. I taught a class that backed up and explained the upcoming paper again, for her and for everyone else, and it helped a lot, I think. But it doesn't make the upcoming task any less daunting. These students are studying literary texts by themselves, finding secondary materials, reading and analyzing them... by themselves. Pretty tough going. I tried to help them choose texts they already knew, for the most part. I have one student doing Mice and Men, another Twelve Angry Men, another couple the novel from which Blade Runner was made, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Fight Club, Frankenstein, and other such stuff. A student today changed her text to James Cain's Double Indemnity because she loves the movie and has studied it before. The next paper is on the movie adaptation of the book.
After class I had a discussion with the girl who lost her fiance, and she told me what happened. It was pretty awful, one those freak heart problems that no one knew existed, despite the fact that he had in fact just had a complete physical, including being seen by a cardiologist. After death, the coroner said he had the heart of an 80 year old. The guy was probably under 30. She is, of course, devastated. Who wouldn't be?
While I was talking to her, my father's cardiologist called (another coincidence) and said that in his view, my father will have a large heart attack, soon, and it will probably kill him. He wants to do an angiogram.
You may recall that in the past, doctors have not done this because of my father's dicey kidneys. To do an angiogram, the doctors must inject a dye, which is not easily tolerated by the kidneys. They could entirely shut down kidneys, in a worst case scenario.
However, this doctor, who has not seen my father before, says that in his view, the kidneys look considerably better than they did last time he was in the hospital, so he feels that if he thoroughly hydrates my father, he could find out what's going on in there, and put in a stent that would keep the heart attack from happening.
I plan to talk it over with my father and with his doctor tomorrow, if I get a chance to do that.
I also tried to take my mother for bloodtests for her upcoming doctor's appt. Friday, but I missed the lab by 10 minutes because I couldn't get the car door open and because my mother forgot how to walk through the parking lot to the lab. Sigh.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had a student last year tell me the exact same thing! What is her name???? I can't think of her name right now but, I for sure remember what she looks like. I sent this student for Help.

Beth

Robbi N. said...

About losing her fiance? It wouldn't have been the same person. This was recent.