Dear Dharma Bunny,

Jesus Bunny! You wascally, wabbit, you!
Why didn't I see it? Odin had Loki, Vishnu had Hanuman, Zeus had Hermes, Ra had Set. I should have guessed that like all celestial sidekicks, you're the one with a sense of humor. How else to explain the stroke my father had during his transplant surgery?
That's right. Towards the end of the surgery when the bloodflow was established from his heart to the new liver, his heart stopped for a minute and then he had a stroke in his brain stem. A little-ish one. Small enough that we didn't notice he had a pronounced droop on the right side of his face for two days after the breathing tube was removed. Small enough that the weakness in his right arm and leg and his thick speech could have still been residual effects from the anesthesia on day 3 or even 4. But by some fluke of bed vacancies, Dad was put in the Neuro ICU where the nurses have an eye for the odd droopy grin or wandering eyeball. So Annette, the fantastic icu nurse supervisor who we were fortunate enough to have for two straight days, got the neuro doc on call to order a CAT scan.

Three days into recovery, an occupational therapist and a neurologist came in, asked questions, gave commands, shined lights and pinged joints. Then another occupational therapist came in. Then they wheeled Dad downstairs for an MRI and Mom and I got lunch and I had a minor meltdown because there is nothing healthy to eat in the hospital so I ended up settling for a banana and a hard boiled egg. Then we went back. Dad was exhausted. The neurologist came back. The CAT scan was ok, but the MRI showed damage to the brain stem. Yep, stroke. But no biggie. Dad was responsive and talkative, a far sight better than he had been just the day before surgery when the encephalopathy was making answering even the most mundane questions an arduous task.

We shouted, we'll take it! He's back, he's out of the woods, his eyes are getting whiter. That's all that matters.

That was two days ago.

Dad was alert and focussed 24 hours after surgery, but since he was moved back to the transplant floor he seems disoriented and slower. The right arm he was able to raise above his head and touch his nose with two days ago sits there as he struggles to make it move. He mechanically clenches his left fist and works his jaw feverishly at chewing the air. And now he often refuses to talk, even though he hasn't been having any significant problems with language.

Which is all fine and good. His brain and body have been through more in five days than most of us will hopefully ever endure in a life time. And his new, healthy liver is contending with the massive clean-up left by eight months of unrelenting disease. But what exactly are we dealing with here? One of the paradoxes of refusing to talk is that one is generally disinclined to tell people why one is refusing to talk. I suppose this is further complicated when one is probably experiencing encephalopathic confusion from liver disease on top of a stroke.

So now the reality creeps in. The process of recovering from a stroke and the process of recovering from an organ transplant will be completely inextricable from each other for my dad, and each complicates the other. It will be weeks or months before we know how severe his disabilities will be. Mom will have new forms to fill out and new claims to file.

But there is fun stuff too, like watching dad make perfect left-handed baskets from across the room for over an hour even though he needs help wadding up kleenexes to toss. And watching him hit the nurse with a kleenex ball when she inadvertently blocked the shot. He makes jokes. When a different nurse adjusted his squishy Coke can-shaped pillow for him, he looked at it and asked her if she did coke before she came to work.

Oh, Jesus Bunny. Before the transplant, I wanted an explanation. Why did my dad get picked by the universe to be the guinea pig for an unprecedented reaction to a drug taken by practically everone? And why didn't it stop when he stopped taking it? I wanted a place to put my anger. Like up the buttholes of Big Pharma hucksters, for example. But then Dad got a liver. We received a new gift of life for my dad. A storybook ending. Except, it wasn't, exactly.

But you know what? I'm not mad anyomore (well, mostly not). I get it. None of us ever gets out of the woods, right? But we might get to see different parts of the forest. So in the words of the Buddha: This is life, the one you get, so go and have a ball. Right?

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me what a precious gift we have received.