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.

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!

You know what's awesome?

Calling your Dad in the hospital and sitting with him on the phone for 15 minutes while he pants in pain waiting for the nurse to come in and move him because he's too weak to pull himself up.

Dear Jesus Bunny

(I moved this here from MySpace.)

Is it so much to ask, on Easter, for my dad to get a new liver? We had what turned out to be transplant dress rehearsal last Monday when a donor liver from Iowa was vetoed at the last minute, after hours of build up. The surgeons didn't tell us why, but under such circumstances, you have to take their word for it. If it's not perfect, you may as well connect a porterhouse steak to the bile ducts and hope for the best.

We were all hoping that you would come through for us again on Friday, which was his birthday AND--soooooo appropriately--Good Friday, the day when, according to tradition, Your Dad, the Dude on the Cross, made the ultimate sacrifice to save everybody. But that didn't happen, despite Your Family's well-documented flair for the theatrical, so now I'm gunning for today, which I guess is really your BIG DAY, a day of capital "R's"--Rejoicing... Renewal... Resurrection. Today, it would still make a good story. "Family's Easter Sacrifice Gives Colorado Man New Life" would make a great slug. Don't you agree, Jesus Bunny? Although I feel a little uncomfortable now that I've suggested it.

You're probably wondering why I'm not taking my appeal directly to Your Dad, since it is his celestial coming out party everyone is celebrating today. And truth be told, you, Jesus Bunny, are just the fuzzy mascot of a brilliant marketing campaign involving ritual homicide and a self-disinterring corpse (Nothing personal. I call 'em as I see 'em). But you bring up a good point. It's complicated, but I'll try to explain. Nothing in life is black or white, contrary to what Bill O'Reilly, lawyers, or Hitler would have us believe. If your job as a magical rodent handing out egg-shaped chocolate to children for the afore-mentioned disinterred corpse hasn't already made you acutely aware of this fact, it will in time, Jesus Bunny.

To break it down, there are two main obstacles that prevent me from making a direct appeal. First, I don't prescribe to the notion that I will be saved because Your Dad died for my sins and the follies of all Mankind to save me/us, although I really like the idea of a guy walking around telling lepers, beggars and whores that they are as worthy of heaven as the wealthy and the educated--without even panhandling. Love thy neighbor, loaves and fishes, don't cast the first stone, and all that. Lovely parables. But they get packaged together with all of this mean-spirited crap, and apparently I'm supposed to swallow the whole pill if I want to truly appreciate the lovely stuff, which I'm disinclined to do. Second, assuming I set all that aside and attempt a heart-to-heart; after we get through the ice-breaker chitchat, what would I say to Your Dad about my dad? How does one go about praying for the death of a total stranger? Isn't that sort of like telling someone you're going to shoot their kid and then asking to borrow the gun?

Of course I wouldn't put it exactly like that, but that's the reality of what has to happen for my dad to get a transplant, and it sure doesn't feel like an acceptable ask. Whatever else I believe, I do believe in the Golden Rule. But my dad is the color of Grey Poupon through no fault of his own and that's the least of his problems. He needs a new liver NOW. So you see my predicament.

Look, Jesus Bunny. I'll be straight with you. I don't see a way around this ideological awkwardness without you acting as intermediary. Your cousin, that fat elf, isn't the appropriate messenger. He's out of season, and besides, he's always laughing and winking. I doubt he's taken seriously at Your Dad's dinner table. Angels are intimidating and bureaucratic. I need someone sincere.

My friend Josh used to have this cartoon taped to his windsheild of you--this tiny rabit crouching before Christ in agony on the Cross--holding an easter egg, your little paw outstretched in offering. A pure, ridiculous gesture. It was hilarious and touching and it perfectly captured all the absurdity, hopefulness, contradiction and innocence of Eastertime.

This is a time of extreme absurdity, hopefulness, humor and desperation for my family. On Good Friday, my dad's birthday, I had a big basket of cookies delivered to his hospital room with a card that read, "It's not a new liver, but I hope this brightens your day." A pure, ridiculous gesture. What else could I do?