Jordan Sr's Aneurysm Drama Begins

This section of blog entries will be about Jordan Sr., who's having one of those health episodes that happen when you're 89 years old. Actually, our story starts when he was just about to turn 89, on September 24th, 2009. I was planning to surprise him for his birthday and just show up on the eve - September 24th, for what I expected would be a quiet but celebratory day on the the 25th.

While my train was pulling in to Penn Station in New York (from Albany), I got a text message from Margy saying that my dad had an aortic aneurysm. That's the brave new world: bad news by text message.

As you might imagine, much telephone calling ensued while waiting to change trains in New York, culminating in a taxi ride from Princeton Junction to my folks' house.

The story: Dad had what turned out to be a urinary condition that led him to his doctor that day. The doctor (the urologist, I think) was sufficiently concerned that he walked dad over to the hospital for the ultrasound. That's when they discovered the aneurysm.

These come in several sizes: the "don't worry about it but watch it" size, the "holy smokes, this could go at any time" size, and the "we'd better do something about this" size. Dad has the medium sized one - close to 6cm in diameter, where the limit of "don't worry about it" is 5.5cm.

Aneurysms also come in several locations, the most common being below the renal arteries and above the iliac ones. The renal location is why they found this in the course of looking at what was wrong with his kidneys. And that's exactly where his is. The wikimedia commons picture is quite good; follow the link if you're interested; the Wikipedia article is quite good as well. All of this was, of course, unknown to us on that Thursday night, so we were fairly stressed out.

In fact, at that point he had had the ultrasound, and was to be scheduled for a CAT scan some time Friday, with the admonition from the nurse at the practice that if radiology didn't call, we were to call her to make sure the appointment was scheduled for sooner rather than later. In the event, they called and scheduled the CAT scan for Monday, which the cardiologists were satisfied with.

So I stayed the weekend and went home on Sunday night.