If You Pray...

Please pray hard, for my grandfather. He's in the hospital right now, this is the fifth time this year that he's been in there (his average stay has been about a week).

He had a heart attack in 1996, and almost three quarters of his heart shut down (I think that's how much it was, keep in mind I was 9 at the time and all of the medical mumbo-jumbo was pretty foreign to me). They told him he only had a few years...and here we are, twelve years later, he's still very active and very stubborn that he's going to be around forever. He's now on dialysis (as of a couple of months ago), as both his kidneys have almost completely shut down. He's in the hospital right now due to his heart doing something they call "atrial fibrillation," where it doesn't pump consistently. This could result in blood build-up, since it's not being pumped out correctly, and that build-up could lead to a blood clot, which could lead to a stroke. They're monitoring him closely, but it's difficult for them to treat things like this for him as one of the effects of the medication for atrial fibrillation is that it lowers his blood pressure, which is already so low it's on the borderline of being dangerous. When we visited him on Sunday, his blood pressure had actually gone up some after starting the medication, so I guess his body is determined to get through this.

Please pray for him and for my family, especially my grandma (they've been married close to 60 years...I can't imagine how hard this must be on her).