take another little piece of my heart

I'm thoroughly and utterly exhausted, and I must confess some secrets to you, Dear Reader, since I have been rather vague about my small-town-life activities the past few days. No, I'm not cooking meth in an abandoned farmhouse. But I came home a week earlier than I anticipated, since I wasn't supposed to fly in until tomorrow, because my dad was having an angiogram last Thursday and I wanted to get here before it happened. As it turns out, it's a good thing I came; the angiogram went totally fine, but rather than putting in stents like they had suspected they would, they decided to schedule him for bypass surgery, which happened this morning. Obviously that was rather upsetting and nervewracking, and so we all spent the whole weekend dealing with/preparing for that, organizing tings, making lists, packing the necessary items, etc., etc.

But, the good news is that it went really well - we had to be at the hospital at five a.m., which was murder, and they took him into the OR at seven. Then my mom, [censored] and I hung out in the waiting room with Uncle Mark for a few hours, getting the occasional update from the surgical nurse (the staff at Mercy is awesome, btw). They ended up doing three bypasses, which was less than we thought it might be, and he came out of surgery on schedule, got off the ventilator sometime this afternoon, and was cracking jokes despite the fact that he can't laugh without causing himself serious pain, so I guess that's all positive. It's going to be a long recovery, but fingers crossed that it all goes well.

By tonight, though, [censored] and I decided that we should make the dark and dangerous journey through deer-infested wilds to come home and take care of some more stuff rather than staying in Des Moines. And I drove, which is an adventure since the pickup I drove is ridiculously high off the ground and is also ridiculously long and wide -- I passed the seventy miles of deer-infested wilds unscathed (and only saw two deer - either it was an off night, or [censored] and I were both so tired that we couldn't effectively scan the ditches), then failed the bonus round when I tried to get the mail, couldn't reach the mailbox, dropped some of it on the ground, and almost faceplanted when I nearly fell out of the truck in an effort to pick everything up. Le sigh. I'm getting up at six a.m. to drive back to Des Moines and relieve my mother for a bit, but I thought I would sleep better in my own bed, and since I'm likely on graveyard shift (hopefully no pun intended) this week given that I'm more likely than Mom and [censored] to be functional at three a.m., sleep would be wonderful. Goodnight!