I'm a Bastard!

For those of you who have been waiting to see how my father is doing, I apologize. Last week was kind of hectic between work, and making sure he and my mom were OK.

As of today, he’s at home and doing just fine. He’s still not quite eating as much as we’d like him to, but he says everything still doesn’t quite taste right. That will probably go away in time.

He also walked around the block yesterday and appears to be getting around just fine, though he is restricted from doing some every day things due to his breast bone having to heal up.

I’ve actually gotten up to Montana to have some vacation time! I wouldn’t have come up here if my dad wasn’t doing good, but since he was getting back to his old self (I got a history and political lesson the last day I saw him in the hospital) I wasn’t too worried about it.

So why am I a bastard?

Well, aside from the times when people have told me that they don’t want to play games with me –

Do you want to play Monopoly?
No.
Why not?
Because you are a bastard
What do you mean?
You play to win
And your point???

- I’m a real smart-ass and have a mouth on me.

My dad had just gotten out of surgery. We waited in the waiting room all day. It was fairly long, and we were all tired. You can imagine, we finally get to see my dad late at night and he’s barely coming around from the anesthesia.

He’s got two chest drain tubes, a catheter, a central line, pacemaker wires, all kinds of IV’s and stuff all over the place, a stomach tube, and he’s on a ventilator. It’s a little distressing seeing him like this, but his color was good and his body temp was back up to normal.

He’s very disoriented, his eyes are glazed and he can barely open them. They agree to take him off the ventilator and we step out of the room while they do this. It’s obviously not very pleasant having a tube shoved down your throat, and probably even less pleasant having them take it out after you just got through having surgery. But, they got it out and then they let us back in to see him.

He’s still pretty much out of it, but acknowledges that we are there. He manages to ask, in a very croaky voice, “What time is it?” to which my mom replies “It’s about 8:15pm.”

Now, in a micro second my brain reacts and I start to blurt out “January 3rd.” (he went in on December 11th) I had to bite my tongue and stifle a giggle. Here is my dad, laid up, just out of open heart surgery, feeling horrible, barely conscious, and just wanting to know what time it is, and then there is me with my natural reaction to fuck with somebody.

I’m a bastard.