November 19, 2014: I went back to school feeling relieved; I remember feeling hungry that morning, something I haven't felt in almost a week. My body must have relaxed and slowly going back to normal. My only class that day won't be done till 1pm but the entire time, I was anxious, I couldn't wait to see Bear again. As soon as class was over, I rushed out of the classroom and left for the hospital. It's been six days so by now, I can memorize my way into the ICU too well, I got there in no time. Bear was still in bed. He had oxygen on but no life support. I was super happy to see him. He wasn't so happy though, he complained that nobody was paying close attention to him. He was in pain for 30 minutes until someone came to help but he felt better when he saw me so everything was fine again. After a few minutes, the PT's came in to help him get up and sit on a chair. He had three tubes below his chest draining fluids from his body so they'll have to assist him in getting up or moving around. He sat on a chair for a while, asked me for his phone and went on facebook to update everyone about how he was doing. He looked great for someone who just had a bypass surgery and a quadruple bypass on top of that. The surgeon decided at the operating table to do a quadruple instead of a triple bypass because he found one more artery that was clogged. No complaints on that, everything went well and that was all that mattered. At 2:30pm, I had to leave again to pick up the kids from school.
After taking care of the kids and leaving them with a sister from church that night, I went back to the hospital at around 6pm. I found out that soon after I left, he experienced a real bad pain that he had to ask them for morphine. Bear had a high tolerance for pain so for him to ask for pain medication meant it was extremely painful. I talked to his nurse and asked if it was normal to experience such pain and he said it was and not to worry because Bear was doing really well and was "ahead of the game" and that in a few days, all the pain will be gone and he will feel so much better than he ever felt in a long time. About an hour later that night, he started to feel the same pain again but he didn't want to take another morphine because it knocks him out and he didn't want to fall asleep while I was still there. I rubbed his lower back and it seemed to help, he calmed down and the pain eventually went away. It didn't last long though, a few minutes later, he felt the pain again so we decided that I go home so he can lay in bed and get some morphine. He had four episodes of pain that day and three shots of morphine.
The next day at the ICU was better, Bear was getting up and walking around the nurses' station but with the help of the PT's because of all the tubes that were still connected to him. On the third day, they took all his tubes and he was moved to Intermediate Care which is just on the other side of Intensive Care. He didn't like intermediate care that much because the nurses don't give him as much attention. He was basically alone most of the time and if you know Bear, being alone is something he didn't care for because he loved talking to people. One afternoon when I visited him, he told me, "so many people came and visit me but none from my family except you and our kids." It broke my heart; I told him his sister couldn't come even if she wanted to because she had a scheduled operation a few days earlier and he understood that. He knew his brothers and his older son had their own reasons too but he just couldn't help himself from feeling sad. I'm not as good of a person as my husband was so I've said things but Bear would always defend them and make excuses for them. Even though I wanted to say more, I kept them to myself because I realized this man loved his family, which made me mad because I didn't see them love him back but of course that's subjective. I'll leave all that between them and him.
In the intermediate care, Bear was getting better each day. He walked better too, he told me that PTs would say "slow down, Mr. McKnight" and he was so proud of that. He said he felt like he could run a marathon. Matter of fact, every time a doctor or nurse asked him how he was doing, he would say, "Awesome! I feel like I could run a marathon." Then, they started talking about getting him home as soon as he had made a bowel movement. Ah, home...where he longed to be. He'd always say, "I want to go home and lay on my comfortable bed."
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