Recovery!! and Grey's Anatomy versus my dad

We got to the ICU this morning and Dad woke up immediately as we were walking in. He was very responsive but couldn't talk yet because he was still intubated. He's a really good eye-roller. They took the tube out about an hour later and started giving him moist oxygen through a mask. He could sort of talk, but was very hoarse after being intubated for so long. We had to lean in to hear him. The nurse gave him a cup full of ice water and little sponges on sticks (swabs) that he could suck on because he's not allowed to drink normally yet, or the fluid could go into his lungs. He was having some trouble navigating the sticks from the cup to his mouth, but once he got the hang of it he gained confidence and kept going for the whole cup. Mom or I would have to run over and grab it from him so he wouldn't drink it or spill it everywhere. He was not happy with us. He also tried to trick us into letting him get out of bed while we were adjusting it to try to make him more comfortable.

His jaundice is already starting to disappear. We could even see a difference over the 3 hours we were with him this morning. I could really see it in the tops of his ears and hands, which are now closer to the color of weather-beaten patio furniture than Post-it notes (this is a good thing). Even his eyes already look better. We left around 1:00 to get some sleep and food and we'll go back over tonight when they move him back upstairs to his room. Mom and I stopped by the nurses station on 7West to see where he'd be, and on the room chart where the patient's last name is supposed to be written next to the room number, his assigned nurse, Nikki, had written "4 Bob!!! :)". Awwwww.

I'll say one thing for major surgery. The patients don't look as pretty in recovery as they do on TV. Aside from the various drains, tubes, and suction pumps pumping/oozing fluids in and out of Dad, he's got crusty yellow sclera around his eyes, brown globs of mucus on his mouth and tongue, and clumps of coagulated blood in weird places, like on his earlobe and the back of his neck (how did it get there?). His lips are swollen and badly chapped from the 12+ hours of intubation, his lazy eye lolls about kind of crazily because of the anesthesia, and his voice is low and croaky. He is a skinny, battle-wounded bullfrog.

His scar, by comparison to the rest of him, is straight out of a text book: a perfectly drawn sideways "L" with the stem going across the right side his abdomen and the little leg pointing up to his sternum, punctuated every few centimeters by very evenly-placed surgical staples. Eventually, the rest of him will catch up to this gleaming tribute to modern medicine, his badge of honor, as the transplant nurses like to say. Hurray!