Bad Day All 'Round

Tuesday afternoon I got a call from my VP with an urgent need for someone from Tulane (aka "me") to be at a 7:45 am meeting up in Jackson MS. The Medical Center and the city are trying to get a Bio-Agro Defense Center, to be built by the Dept. of Homeland Security, located there and Tulane's National Primate Research Center is involved. This was to be a site visit by the site selection team, so we had the Governor and various city officials at the meeting, along with the Univ. of Mississippi Health Sciences folks. They are up against some significant competition on this one, including Research Triangle Park, Texas A&M, etc., although I'd have to say that they do have some rather important political leverage. So anyway, rather than drive up at night I decided to set the alarm for 4 am (again) and make the drive in the relative peace of the wee hours. I actually love driving that time of night when the roads are virtually all mine. This time, though, I was surprised to see so many people commuting in the other direction, toward New Orleans, around 5 am. I guess there are still a lot of people living up around Hammond and driving in to work every day.

So I get to the meeting in downtown Jackson, just a block from the old Tour le Fleur criterium course, and sit through the presentations, all the while feeling a worsening sore throat and queasy stomach. I was thinking I was having a bad day, but as I was to soon learn, that's all relative. There were no questions from the team about Tulane's participation, so basically I ended up just being a warm body representing one of the partner institutions. The team then went off to catch a helicopter for a tour of the potential physical sites, and I headed immediately for my car to drive back to New Orleans. I was in kind of a hurry because I had gotten some very disturbing news via cellphone halfway through the meetings telling me that my father had suffered a stroke. And I thought I was having a bad day.

On the drive home I started to get some details, and to make a long story short, it was apparent from the symptoms that we were dealing with a left hemisphere, frontal lobe ischemic stroke that had caused some significant aphasia, a major loss of motor function to his right arm, and significant weakness to his right leg. Complicating this whole scenario was that he was in the hospital at the time having a catheter inserted into his bladder because of a urinary blockage, so I'm guessing it was probably a little embolus or something, though I'm sure nobody will admit to that. So naturally I ended up at the hospital until late at night, especially since the neurologist who had gotten the referral, and apparently only a very sketchy history, didn't show up until about 10 pm. She had, at least, seen the CAT scan from earlier that day, and ordered an MRI and various other tests for the morning, a couple of which, like the carotid ultrasound, I had to tell her had already been done. She did a quick assessment and was fairly positive about the ultimate outcome. Looks like the next few weeks are going to be long...

By 10:30 last night my two sisters and I had worked out a rough schedule and since I didn't have the first "shift," I was able to make the morning training ride. Needless to say I was a little preoccupied and still rather tired, but it was good to be on the bike. As I was getting ready to leave for work I turned on my Palm Pilot to check email and it for some reason decided it needed to download 173 messages. I fell asleep waiting for it to finish. I guess I really was tired.