Today is my father's seventy-seventh birthday,

and he is currently stable after a slate of recent surgeries, still sedated at the Ottawa Heart Institute. His double bypass (and valve replacement) scheduled for the Thursday before last turned into a triple bypass (and valve replacement), which developed into requiring a pacemaker, and short-term kidney dialysis to help clean him out. He's pretty much been sedated the whole time (missing out on Father's Day, and most likely today as well), mostly for the sake of his comfort.

Saturday was bad (real bad), but another surgery that afternoon improved him considerably, putting him back to where he was the day after his original surgery a week-plus ago, which also meant a tracheotomy yesterday afternoon, to assist with eventually removing the breathing tube (over the next day or three, hopefully). The sense is that he should be fine (we're going one day at a time, obviously), but that he's going to be in the hospital for another month, as opposed to the original three days the doctor suggested. Of course, its his diabetes and multiple sclerosis that have been throwing things off, preventing certain treatments from being available to him. He improves, slowly. And he rests.