I love you daddy.

Saturday night at 6:50 pm my father passed away. It was a long battle, starting before we even knew. He fought it every day. He never complained and never asked "why me?". He fought until he was surrounded by his family, waiting for his sisters and his brother to arrive. He stopped fighting so hard once he realized everyone who loved him was surrounding him with love.

He was, and always will be the most amazing man I have ever met, and I will miss him everyday.

A Lot of Talk

So up until this point I have given you lots of information, told you some stories, and some of my depressing stories. I have not however, introduced you to the man behind this disease. My father was one of the smartest, and funniest people I have ever met in my life. When I was little he knew everything, and if he didn't he made it up. As I got older I thought he made up more than I thought, but I wonder now if it wasn't the disease affecting his memory more and more and not that he just never knew these things.

So, here in an array of pictures (as I have not transferred the videos he is in to dvd) is my father.

Then This Happened.

This is an MRI of my father's brain. With an MRI they can scan his brain and create a picture showing bright areas that will allow them to locate areas that have been affected by stroke within the last two weeks. They will also show damage to the brain from past MRIs.
In the upper right scan you can see large amounts of white leaching into my father's brain, dotted with marks of black. The white is area of lost cognition, this is equal to that of an 80-90 year old brain. The black spots within the white of from past strokes that have damaged that part of his brain in those areas.
If you look to the scan just below that, to the one in the lower right, you will see what the newer strokes look like on an MRI. These come up as bright spots. In conclusion, these scans from early this morning showed the doctors that he has had at least 4 new strokes in the last 2 weeks time.
This can mean different things for many different people depending on the type of strokes, where the strokes are and how large of a stroke they have. The kind my father had were actually small ones, but because he was so limited in his speech and movement to begin with it doesn't take much to set him back.
This set of strokes added a new level of discomfort to his life. The most noticeable and painful is called spasticity. When they tried a recommended drug to get rid of the spasticity my father became so "relaxed", and out of it that he did not know anyone around him, could not react to anything happening around him, and had no gag reflex at all.
They have since removed him from this drug and he has slowly started to return to what is assumed to be his new normal, which is assumed to be non-mobile at this point. His speech is very difficult at this point and he still has a lot of trouble feeding himself.

It's Been A While.

In the last post I talked about my dad being being in rehab for anywhere up to three months. Well it is about 3 days shy of that three months and as of last week he was moved from the temporary care part of the rehab facility to the more permanent floor until we could find someplace, a care facility, foster home for adults, or a nursing home, in which we wanted to place him.
This move put quite a bit of stress on my father as he thought that the 3rd floor was where the people went when they were "really bad off". Essentially he thought we were dumping him off on the 3rd floor and forgetting about his rehab, and any hope of him getting any better at all. He remained agitated after his move to the 3rd floor even though we were able to bring some of his things around him, he was still taken down to therapy, and some of his favorite nurses actually worked on this floor as well. It was hard seeing him so unhappy but there was no where else to move him at this time. According to law he had to be moved from the temporary unit at this time and we have put his name on several waiting lists for homes that we like, but none of them have a bed available for him yet.