Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Well, we’re still here in Pittsburgh. But no internet access again at the Family House and this time even the guest computer is broken and not working.

I arrived late yesterday. At least late compared to when I wanted to get here. We had just enough time to get done what we needed to do and check in to the Family House on Neville St.

I drove Al’s car down here. It wasn’t doing it any good sitting idle in my driveway for so long and the other vehicles were needed back at home. I cleaned out the car, got the slow leak fixed in the tire and thought I was all set to go. But I got on the Thruway and started hearing a noise. At first it was a tick-tick-tick noise and I thought maybe it was low on oil and I was hearing lifter noise. I hadn’t heard anything on short drives around town. Continue Reading…

I had hoped Al would be posting more here to keep everyone updated on his progress after the transplant, but he’s only made a couple postings. That’s okay, maybe he hasn’t felt like it, or has been too distracted by the constant attention he’s getting (to his consternation) from the nursing staff…

But I’ve been in touch daily mostly via IM. He’s been doing well, with no real setbacks. At this point, he’s got every one of the multitude of tubes had attached to him removed, with the exception of one IV in his mediport. I’m sure he’s probably getting important things through that, like antibiotics. There’s something about removing an IV that they never like to do until the last minute. It’s like they want to yank it out as your walking out the door.

Of course, the only thing worse than waiting forever to get an IV out is having to put one back in because it was taken out too early. But with the mediport, that’s relatively minor. Continue Reading…

I was curious how many people have been visiting this site since Albert’s surgery. I know a lot of you have left comments and well-wishes, so I know there is interest.

There has been a definite surge in traffic here since the 23rd of October, which you can see in the chart. I almost never check this and I don’t have a page counter on this site. They’re tacky and unreliable anyway. Most of the time, I don’t care if I have 3 or 3,000,000 viewers. But this is interesting.

This chart is Unique Visits, in other words individual people, no matter how many pages they read. We hit a peak of 1,930 raw views on the 28th. Wow! Continue Reading…

I went for my first bronchoscopy this morning. Apparently these invasions will be a regular part of my health regime – bimonthly for the first year, tri-monthly during the second year, then as directed, such as when illness occurs. It’s the primary means of collecting information on the status of the donor lungs and is thusly a very necessary evil. The upshot is that the lungs are accessible through existing bodily channels, unlike say, a liver or a kidney; collecting tissue samples for biopsy is quicker and far cleaner.

I only had a cursory knowledge of what a bronchoscopy entails, so I was hesitant. Anything that goes down my windpipe had damned well better be or digestible, that’s my motto. The whole process, barring complication, takes little more than twenty minutes. I was administered a dose of a sedative known as Versed, which is known to induce fugues. Throughout the process, I’m told, I was never comatose, I just have no memory of what happened after they told me the Versed was going in. They could’ve stripped naked and danced to “Love Shack” for fifteen minutes, for all I know. Continue Reading…