Father's year of recovery

Last year, my sister, brother, stepmother and I ate Thanksgiving dinner in a mostly empty hospital cafeteria room.

It was a surreal experience that I'll never forget. The food, actually, wasn't bad, and I was sharing it with family, but it was far from a festive occasion.

Two days earlier, on this day of the week last year, my dad had undergone his second open heart surgery in 13 years, when he had a quintuple bypass. This time around, it was to replace his aortic valve, which was operating at 18 percent of normal function, with a mechanical one. Without the surgery, his doctor in North Carolina gave him four to six months to live.

Many of you may be familiar with all this because I've logged three columns on his journey, starting with the first sign of trouble in early November 2008, a report following the surgery and a Father's Day update.

On this anniversary and as we approach Thanksgiving, I'm reflecting on that week, the really tough, often depressing winter and the slow re-emergence of a man I love so dearly, a man who yearns for more years to keep serving others in his many roles as a pastor, teacher, husband and father.

The year has brought us closer in many ways. I've called almost every day, a little less lately, "just to check in." He typically gives me a report that usually revolves around his rehab, how much he slept, what he ate, the effects of his medications (blood thinners are tricky business) and whether his neuropathy was firing up, which is both often and awful, and then any other news.

Large chunks of his day and energy go into his survival.

On the last weekend of August, my girlfriend and I, as well as one of her close friends, took a trip to Detroit to see him.

While there, I went to rehab with him and was frankly amused, and quite pleased, that my Dad bordered on having an obsession with making it to weekday rehab sessions at the Henry Ford Hospital, the staff of which threatened to "kick him out" (Dad's words) of the program last spring if he didn't make it every day.

That tough love worked!

My dad, who grew up poor and plowed fields as a child barefooted and behind a mule, shunned exercise throughout his adult life. Now, he was tracking his daily and cumulative mileage on stationary bicycles and stair-stepping machines on an imaginary trek through Michigan. Besides the exercise, he eats plenty of vegetables, little meat and almost no desserts, partly due to being diabetic.

Today, he's so much better than last November, when a series of chest-pain episodes beat him down and ultimately resulted in a minor heart attack while in a waiting room at Duke. Yet he isn't the man he was in the months before the episodes arrived, and he knows it. A really great day can be followed by a string of bad ones.

For a man who long had a razor sharp memory, his is now merely good. He still can remember wonderful stories, jokes and Bible verses, but sometimes comes up short on words and names. It frustrates him and, as my stepmother speculates, makes it even harder for him to recall something.

On a call about this column, he couldn't come up with the word "catheterization" and the name "Lewis Grizzard," the late humor columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But my dad was able to recall that the "Georgia columnist," Grizzard, who had his aortic valve replaced with a pig valve, had joked with his surgeon that he wanted to choose the pig the valve came from.

The other major frustration that sticks with him is his eyesight, specifically being unable to read small print in newspapers, magazines and books. But that seems to be getting better, too. Just not fast enough for him.

He worries that when he returns to Duke University Divinity School in early January to teach one class, not the usual two-plus classes, that his eyesight may hinder him.

In recent months, he's preached three times, helped out on one wedding in New York City, conducted three funerals, attended church every Sunday and made phone calls to shut-ins and others in need of contact.

"In many ways, I'm living as normal and active of a life as someone can in their 77th year," he says. "My biggest concern is my vision."

At the same time my dad approaches his anniversary, his 65-year-old brother is adding another chapter to the family history of heart disease. Just last week, he was released from the hospital and told my dad, "I don't think I'll live to 77." Unlike Dad, my uncle still doesn't seem to make the connection between lifestyle and his disease.

Before leaving the hospital, he had called about getting some oysters, which are high in cholesterol and definitely not rehab food.

As Dad gets back, finally, into his flow of living, albeit a tad slower, I will be taking many moments this Thanksgiving week to feel and express gratitude for modern medicine, which is the only reason he is alive today, and for his new outlook on living a healthy lifestyle.

And that may assure many more Thanksgivings to come.

For more from David Quick, visit his Running Charleston blog at www.postandcourier.com.

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