A Sobering Experience – No not in the sense that I was drunk and now sober, more in the sense that you sit back and evaluate life. My family and I had quite a reality check two weeks ago. It was a normal Monday night, Melody and I were laying in bed playing with Micah. Why is my phone vibrating… Oh no! A message from my brother, my father is having a heart attack, there’s an ambulance there evaluating him.
A cold feeling comes over me, not like this, not now! You are way too young to be leaving us now! Your only grandchild is 1 year old, he needs to get to know his grandfather, the great man that I know. The man that I looked up to all my life.
This is quite a hard post to write. Reliving the experience of walking in and seeing my dad laying on the floor with a heart monitor attached, paramedics hovering over him. I’ve never seen him look this vulnerable. I’m used to seeing him as a big man, strong with a tough exterior, made to kick ass, being a teacher (I was in his class for a year) and then principal, retired at the end of last year, also given the fact that he is a brown belt in karate added to that effect.
I can only imagine how my mother, brother and sister felt, they were right there when it happened. I live about 10 minutes away, but I’m sure that I gave my Fiestas little engine a beating that night and made it there in 5 with my little family in toe. Stopping a little bit away from the ambulance, I get out, the smell of hot clutch and engine floating around the car.
I’m not one that talks about his feelings a lot, I would normally just brush things off and move on but this is something that sticks with you. The fear that gripped me that night, I can’t forget. I tried so hard to do things that night, so that we could get out and into the car but halfway through looking for something for Micah to wear, I just found myself wondering what I was doing. I’m normally very focussed in everything that I do, but not that night.
We waited for what felt like ages for them to leave and take him to the hospital, they were giving him a blood thinner and waiting for his blood pressure to come back up. He was down to 30bpm, which if you look at it this was was 1 heart beat every 2 seconds. A normal heartbeat at a rest is twice that in an adult. I don’t know how long we waited but it must have been 20-30 minutes before they decided to take him to hospital. I have to thank one paramedic that really stood out that night, Gail thank you.
Now again back in the car. Tailing behind my sisters car after the ambulance. Down all the familiar roads that I take when going to the shop on a normal day, Except this time I’m doing a hell of a speed… I get cut off by some person ignoring my hazard lights and the fact that I’m following an ambulance. They slow down to a snails pace, there’s no way around, I just lost the ambulance. I don’t know where the hospital is. I pull into a street and turn around because I know that the hospital is somewhere in the area. Get out my phone, Google maps, don’t fail me now, why am I getting no search results! Turn on your 3G! Finally get the 3G and GPS on, the hospital is right behind us so I turn the car around again and speed up the hill.
Wow this hospital looks terrible at the emergency reception. After some time waiting with Melody, Micah and my brother and sister we get word from Gail who just slipped out of the reception area to let us know what’s happening. He’s stable and the doctors are monitoring him.
Again we’re waiting, this time it must have been an hour of waiting with no news. We try looking in through a window and spot my dads head, slowly moving from side to side.
We’re getting hungry, Micah is out of milk so I bite the bullet and take a drive home to make Micah a bottle and get McDonalds on the way back to the hospital. We finally get back and my brother and sister are standing in the parking ready to get in the car and leave. They give us the news, he had a massive heart attack and they are working to clear the clot with drugs. According to the doctors, if he was administered the drugs 5 minutes later, he would not have made it. We’re told to go home, there’s nothing else that they need from us.
So for the next 4 days my father was laid out in the ICU, nurses telling him that he needs to keep his blood pressure down. Which seemed like a difficult thing to do once we were allowed to visit him the following day. He hates the fact that he put us through the whole ordeal. I’m just glad that I still have my father.
I didn’t want Micah to see him like that but we couldn’t avoid it. Since Micah can’t tell us how he’s feeling we can only assume by his actions that he knew something had happened, he’s still a bit wary about being around my dad now. Probably wondering why his grandfather isn’t picking him up and walking around with him like he would do whenever we’d visit which is about once or twice a week. My dad still has another 6 weeks of recovery ahead of him.
No matter how old you get, even if you become a dad yourself, you still need your own dad.
