Where is George?

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dkalwishky
Posts: 95
Joined: Fri Dec 06, 2002 2:20 am

Where is George?

Post by dkalwishky »

I've noticed an absense of posts from George in the last few weeks. He is also missing from the Cessna Owners online forums.

Some of us were wondering where he's been off to? Things aren't the same without him around.
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N1478D
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Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:32 pm

Post by N1478D »

George's Dad is in the hospital and George has been there with him. Wish there was current information. There was a good recovery and then a setback. Please have George's Dad and George in your prayers.
Joe
51 C170A
Grand Prairie, TX
doug8082a
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Post by doug8082a »

Absolutely! Our thoughts and prayers are with him.
Doug
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N1478D
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Post by N1478D »

I am sure that George would not mind me sharing this PM from him with you:

From: gahorn
To: N1478D
Posted: Mon Jan 13, 2003 7:00 pm
Subject: Re: rudder skins
Thanks.
Re: My Dad.
He's a hoot. He's 82 and came thru the surgery with flying colors. This
is all the result of an aneurism found on his aorta during investigation of
a heartburn complaint. In order to surgically correct the aneurism, the
doctor wanted a clear report from a cardiologist. But the cardiologist
found he needed a double by-pass first.
Dad as mad at the cardiologist because he'd been seeing the guy for 30
years since a heart-attack in the late 60's. The guy has made him jog 2
miles, three times a week for 30 years, and been giving him EKG's and a
clean bill of health until this latest thing. (Dad has hated the jogging
but has done it religiously.) Anyway, it's believed that the blocked
arteries are actually the result of the heart attack 30 years ago! Dad was
put-out that they've been missed all these years.
He went into surgery Wed. at 6 AM, but laid around waiting on the gurney
for 2 hours before they started actual surgery at 8 AM and he came out at
10:30. I was there but he was asleep for the next 6 hours. I left the room
and when I came back he had his eyes open and said, "Hi, George. How are
you?"
I said, "Fine, Dad. How are you feeling?"
He said, "Well, I'm gettin' exasperated. I wish they'd get this show on
the road. I'm gettin' tired of waiting!"
When I told him he'd completed the surgery and he'd done just fine, he
started chuckling, and said, "You're kidding! Well, what do you know about
that. Give me a hug!"
The next day he ordered the cutest nurse out of his room for trying to
stuff a tube nown his nose and throat when he told her to stop. "Listen
here, young lady....YOU don't determine when the pain threshold has been
met. I do!" Ha!
I think he's doing a lot better now that he thinks he's taken charge of
his own treatment. He's up and walking around 48 hours afterwards, and is
giving us all instructions on how to take care of some business matters
before he's released. Ha!

On a sidenote, while reading the paper he noticed a name in the Houston
Chronicle obituaries,..."Minczberg". (The father of David Minczberg, former
Dem. Party Chair.) Mr. Minczberg, an orphan whose parents had been killed
in the Holocaust, jumped off the train to the Treblinka death-camp and
escaped the Nazi's during WW-2. After the war my Dad helped him become
established in the Houston area, and trained him as my Dad's apprentice in
the electrician's union, IBEW #716, in Houston. (Minczberg, a Pole, spoke no
English, and Dad spoke no Polish, but they both spoke high-school German,
and so communicated on the construction sites to the consternation of fellow
workers.) Later on, Minczberg became a successful Houston electrical
contractor, and he and Dad remained good friends. Mr. Minczberg died while
Dad was in the hospital, and Dad saw it in the paper yesterday, and has
instructed us to bring him stationary so he can write the family. Mr.
Minczberg was also one of the founders of the Holocaust Museum on Caroline
Street in Houston.

Not exactly a story of great interest to many, but one that our family has
just now become aware of thru Dad's recent hospital visits. This is another
one of the "mysteries" that we as a family find out about Dad, usually by
accident. (For those not familiar with this modest man, Dad has many times
been involved with one thing or another having never breathed a word of it
to the family members,...like the time Mom rec'd a phone call from the
Secret Service because she'd hung up on the White House secretary thinking
it a practical joke rather than Pres. Johnson actually trying to communicate
with her husband! Or the time we found out in a Nat'l Geographic article
that Dad was one credited with creating the country's first shock-tauma unit
when he was on the Board at Ben Taub Hospital, and so on, and so on...)

Anyway, Dad's doing very well. We expect him to be allowed to go home
later this week. He'll return in 3 weeks for the aorta/aneurism surgery.
He'll likely still be able to outrun me!

Thanks to all for the prayers!
George
Joe
51 C170A
Grand Prairie, TX
dkalwishky
Posts: 95
Joined: Fri Dec 06, 2002 2:20 am

Post by dkalwishky »

Thats a relief. We will say a prayer for his fathers quick recovery.

I did pass some of this info over to the Cessna Owners Orgination forum as well.
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GAHorn
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Post by GAHorn »

Thanks to all for the prayers on behalf of my Dad!
I've just returned home for a day or two before going back to Houston. The family is attempting to keep at least one member with Dad at all times. Here's the current status.
After one week, Dad was released from the hospital and Mom went to get the car out of the parking garage. (I was driving from home to Houston to assist her in getting him home.)
While waiting in his room after the cardiologist had given him the "all clear" to go home and resume life, he made a phone call and while on the phone suddenly "coded" (as they say in hospital vernacular). In other words he had a classic heart attack. His heart "fibrillated" meaning it started beating so rapidly as to be useless, and he fell to the floor, technically dead.
A passing nurse looked thru the open door and saw him on the floor and hit the alarm. They used the paddles on him along with CPR, and in the words of the cardiologist who had returned to the room along with all the other personnel, "After 15 minutes working on him with no response, I thought I'd lost this patient, when some One greater than I took over and re-started your Father's heart." (Not often have I heard a doctor give credit where it's due.)
We were all worried for about 24 hours about brain damage when Dad woke up the next day. Noticing he was back in ICU, he rather irritatingly asked "What am I doing back in here!" Fortunately, it seems his mental faculties are intact.
He underwent additional surgery the following day to install an ICD, which is a high-tech pacemaker/de-fibrillator. It seems that the bypass surgery may have altered the electrical pathways in the heart, and this will prevent another episode like that one. It remains passive in a monitoring mode, but if anything begins to get awry, the ICD will take over and pace his heart back to normalcy, then return to monitor mode. (This is the same type unit recently in the news that was installed in v.p. Dick Cheney.)
Unfortunately, following this second surgery, he's been slowly losing weight and strength. He simply has no appetite and will not eat despite our threats to force-feed him. He can't seem to keep food down. I suspect that it's related to overmedication and I've asked all the doctors (there are 4 of them) to re-evaluate why each medication is being given. They've agreed to discontinue or greatly reduce some of them. (Why, for example, were they giving him Zocor to reduce cholesterol, when he'd never had a cholesterol problem in his life, and since checking into the hospital 21 days ago, he hasn't eaten anything other than a few liquids. Zocor has a nasty side-effect of appetite suppresion and nausea!) Ditto for anti-biotics when he has no infection ("We give anti-biotics to all patients..."), which then was followed by oral-Nystatin to counter the effects of antibiotics. Ditto for a potassium-retaining diuretic (to make him urinate more while hospitalized, yet prevent the loss of potassium that urinating causes),...then making him swallow a foul-tasting liquid that rids him of excess potassium,...all while he's dizzy from low blood pressure due to dehydration! Duh! It's a diuretic, stupid. Last night I found them coming into the room at 2AM with a hypodermic syringe to give him what I thought was a regular blood-thinning dose. "His blood thinner?", I asked. "No. It's his insulin.", the nurse responded. "For his diabetes."
"My Dad's not diabetic and never has been.", I said. I chased him out of the room and summoned the physician to have the nursing staff re-briefed on my Dad's treatment.
A related problem is his pain. Since his bypass surgery required his chest to be opened up wide, and then resewn together, and then the CPR they administered to revive him has broken all that loose again as well as breaking a couple of ribs, ...he's been troubled by considerable pain. His lungs have been collecting phlegm and coughing keeps his chest torn up. It's going to be a long road now, and pain medication adversely affects appetite as well. (Not to mention ability to swallow, poor guy.)
I hope all you who are reading this will make certain to spend time with your loved one if they are hospitalized. You won't believe the errors I've caught this hospital in, and this is supposedly one of the best, if not the best, in the world inside the Houston Medical Center!
Anyway, he's been transferred to a rehabilitation unit to rebuild his strength prepatory to going home. We hope he'll begin to eat now that we've insisted they reduce him from 14 pills twice a day to just a few. This man used to never take so much as an aspirin, and did his own yard work and jogged/walked 1.5 miles each day for the last 30 years. Now he's allowed the doctors to talk him into what appears to be elective surgery, in an effort to prolong his quality of life, ... and his health may be wrecked. He cannot lift himself unassisted from the bed.
I'll return to Houston for a few more weeks on Sunday, and will try to stay in touch when I can.
Thanks again for all prayers. This is a truly fine man who has done good things for others all his life.
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N1478D
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Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:32 pm

Post by N1478D »

That's really upsetting news, sorry to hear it George. It seems to be a common problem that mulitple doctors do not coordinate amongst themselves, and sometimes within their own medications. Our prayers are with your Dad, you, and your family.
Joe
51 C170A
Grand Prairie, TX
flyer170
Posts: 116
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Post by flyer170 »

My prayers are with you and your father George.

That's also why they call it medical practice
Bob
rudymantel
Posts: 451
Joined: Sat Nov 23, 2002 4:03 pm

Post by rudymantel »

Or medical mal-practice. And all the politicians (and insurance companies) want, to cure our health care problems, is to cap malpractice awards !
George, my prayers go for your Dad-
Rudy
C170Driver
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Staying with your Dad in hospital - the right thing

Post by C170Driver »

Scary - but had a similar expereince with my father this last year. The downright goofy stuff they were trying to give him almost did him in on more than one occassion, including large doses of morphine. We had to watch the clock and track down staff for missed meds, and had to read every medication. He had terminal cancer - but did NOT want to die in the stupid institution. Wonderful pain Doc swithced him to epidural, and while it tethered him to a portable pain pump - we took him home for the last few months. Pain Doc knew the score and said "my job is to get him comfortable and out of here before they kill him." We will pray for a speedy recovery.
Pat Shier
"We were ignorant, and we were ignorant of the fact we were ignorant. That is ignorance squared, and it can lead to disaster." Igor Sikorsky
Harold Holiman
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Joined: Tue Apr 23, 2002 1:54 pm

Update from George?

Post by Harold Holiman »

Does anybody have a update on how George's Daddy is doing? We are all hopeing and praying he is getting better.

Harold H
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GAHorn
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Post by GAHorn »

Pat is correct!
The Methodist Hospital in the Houston Medical Center does not enjoy simply a great reputation...they enjoy the Best reputation in the World for a heart hospital. But we finally just took my Dad out of there before they could kill him.
And we did so just in time. Within 36 hours of removing him to a smaller, more personal hospital, firing his "team" of specialists at Methodist, and bringing in his original family physician (who called in his own team of advisors), my Dad was diagnosed with Septicemia/Shock and was down to less than 48 hours to live. His blood pressure had fallen to 77/36 and his temp had shot up to 104. The new hospital (Park Plaza in Houston) and the team immediately knew what to do, gave him IV's of the correct antibiotics this time, stuck Tylenol suppositories in him to drop the temp, and fed him Dopamine thru the IV to "whip" his heart all night long at 120+ beats-per-minute! By morning he had recovered to blood pressure of 110/60, tempurature normal 98.6 and respiration rate of less than 19 per minute! His oxygenation had soared to 99% (and this in an emphysema sufferer!)
In 48 hours Dad is now sitting up in bed, eating, reading the newspapers, and engaged in meaningful conversations!
Moral: If you have a loved-one in the hospital, ...keep a family member with them 24hours a day, read the medications, check the PDR (Physician's Desk Reference) for containdications and adverse reaction warnings, and don't be afraid to question care-givers and offer your opinion to them based upon your own intimate knowlege of the patient!
I've come to realize that our health-care system is not designed to cure the ill. It's designed to provide a means of income for healthcare providers. If the patient gets well, then that's fine, ....but that's not their focus.
Again,...my Dad's hospitalization is not happenchance. It's now common. Two doors down in the ICU is a man who had a successful heart transplant at St. Lukes. It was perfect. He's 44 years old and doing fine,....for a man in a permanent coma because they failed to test his blood transfusion for West Nile virus! His family removed him from St. Lukes and brought him to Park Plaza for the same reasons we moved Dad. At least now their patient has his eyes open....even if he doesn't recognize anyone.
But,...don't worry. The powers that be have a solution. They want to limit malpractice lawsuits to $250K in damages so doctor's malpractice insurance premiums don't price them out of business.
I believe this is nothing more than a windfall for insurance companies and bad healthcare people.
I've got a better idea. Let the bad doctors have a tough time getting insurance and they'll go out of business. Don't limit the awards to the families who now suffer the pain and have to care for the permanently injured.
Anyway,...I'm home for the weekend only, and I'll be back in Houston to help my Dad's recovery for a few more weeks. Maybe he'll regain the 40 lbs of lost muscle thru rehabilitation, and will be able to walk again someday unassisted. I doubt he'll ever be able to jog 1.5 miles a day again, like he did only 5 weeks ago.

*Oh, yeah, ...and how's this for robbing the system? When Methodist Hospital transferred him from one floor to the next within the same hospital, ...the new room wasn't ready yet because the hospital hadn't discharged the other patient until they could finish his paperwork, so Dad was unable to transfer into the new room until 9 PM that night.
When we rec'd a copy of the hospital bill a week later, it included $120 late check-out fee they had charged Medicare! Wanna bet they also charged that to the other patient's bill as well? And yet as a nation we're told Medicare is going broke and it's because the Medicare system is bad? Baloney! It's because big business takes advantage of the small guy! That's why.

Anyway, Thanks everone for the prayers.
And thanks for the patience of all those members who've called my home with Parts/Mx questions and didn't receive a prompt response. Don't give up. I'll get them all answered ASAP.
Best regards.
George
mslindstrom
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Joined: Thu Sep 26, 2002 10:15 pm

Post by mslindstrom »

George,

Glad things are better with your Father now that you moved him to Park Plaza. I can personally vouch for the chemistry lab results for most routine and theraputic drug assays. I do not personally take care of the analyzers but I did install them, and cover them on a regular basis.

As for the blood screening for west nile - there is not a routine screening test for west nile at this point in time. I was in Indy this past week for training on a new PCR system and we will be ramping up for screening blood donations for west nile by mid year. The company I work for and one other were asked by the FDA to develop the methodology and proceedures for screening for the west nile virus.

Mark
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