I generally don't open up a whole lot about personal stuff outside of how much I love my wife and such, but having been here for 8 years now, this place, and the people I've come to know despite never having met most of you, are literally like another family to me. Thought I'd pass along what happened to me this weekend. Be warned, it's long and kinda all over the place. Anyway, I know that my family would appreciate any prayers anyone may offer up.
My niece (who lives in the on-site apartment at my parents' house) called me Saturday morning, telling me that my mom can’t wake my dad up, and that they took him away in an ambulance and he’s unresponsive. My mom had called my sister immediately when she couldn’t wake dad and my sister was there immediately. My sister works in a medical center/clinic/doctor’s office and kinda knows a thing or two about keeping calm and checking for vitals in such a situation. She checked his pulse right away and knew that he was still alive at least, they just couldn’t wake him. Which wasn’t the info my brother or I got at 8:30 Saturday morning. We got “unresponsive” from my niece, so I clearly need to teach her what “unresponsive” means, because to most people that means no pulse, no breathing, etc. I didn't find out until later that my sister had already assessed his state to some degree. So for a couple hours, I’m sitting there not sure whether or not he was even alive, just that somebody would be getting back to me ASAP. Mrs. C. was half an hour away at a college graduation. So that was pretty stressful.
They get him to the hospital, and manage to get him to respond to some small degree, with very slurred and mostly unintelligible speech. Also one side of his face is a little droopy. They do a CT scan to check for a stroke, it comes back negative, but other tests find opiates in his urine. He's still pretty much snoring away, but they somehow managed to get him to respond to commands like raise your arms, for example, while he's pretty much asleep. They think "Ok, CT scan was negative, he must have somehow gotten into medication that conflicted with his own (based on the opiate finding)". My dad takes blood pressure medication and whatever he has to do for diabetes management. Mom said he'd taken some prescription cough medicine (the aforementioned "opiates") the night before, a little more than the recommended dose. However, we know that it wasn't the kind with codeine, as my mother is too sensitive to sedatives and can't have codeine. So they start him on Narcan and try to wait it out to see if it will counteract the presumed medication issue.
24 hours later, he's still pretty well zonked out and responding slightly more than before. The little bit he says is slightly more understandable. They decide that an MRI is in order. MRI results indicate a stroke in the area of the brain stem. I later come to find from a doctor that Mrs. C works for that the brain stem is well shielded enough by bone, that CT scans will often not see strokes that occur there. So at this point, everybody's a little more than pissed that they were chasing this medication reaction issue for so long. I know my dad well enough to know that he's careful about his medication and would not do something this irresponsible, even at 76 years old, so as soon as I was told they suspected a medication issue, I balked at the idea. I knew that it wasn't medication related. However, the doctors also said that, due to it happening where it did, it was very likely that he would eventually come out of this mostly unscathed.
So by Monday, he's awake and ready to GTFO of the bed. My sister and niece had to sleep in chairs on either side of the bed, in order to ensure that he didn't sneak out of the bed and get up. And he tried several times. His speech is starting to get better and the doctor can converse with him, although it's still hard to understand. They've told him what has happened to him and confirmed that the only medication he'd taken was BP medication and cough syrup. Yesterday, even better, they sent him for an MRA scan, and I'm still waiting to hear the results from that. He's out of ICU and on the rehab/therapy floor, for speech therapy and physical therapy, helping him walk around. They had to do swallow tests, first with water, then later with applesauce, etc., to ensure that he was capable of eating and drinking and not choking. A-ok there. My sister knew he was starting to feel better when he demanded coffee.
So he hadn't really
eaten between Friday and yesterday and was apparently cleared to eat like normal.
Apparently his usual wit and personality are starting to show back up. I spoke to him for a while last night on the phone and it's clear that he knows what he wants to say and knows how to articulate it, but I had a tough time understanding about half of it. Had I been there to see his lips moving and hear him, I might have understood more. Everybody indicates being very encouraged at the progress he's made already and that's great news. Unfortunately, he won't be able to be back home for Christmas, so we will try to take Christmas to him. They're 5 hours away (Roanoke, VA) and we'd already planned to be there on Saturday. I feel terrible not being there now, but I know that he appears to be on the mend and everybody else has things pretty much under control.
My mom is pretty much scatterbrained at this point, as when this happened, they still had shopping left to go do together, they've got a couple rooms at the house torn up and stuff everywhere, as they were replacing carpets and such, to try to finish up before Christmas. And being a mother, she's very particular about her house being presentable. She's worried about all the present wrapping to be done, which I told her to not worry with. My sister-in-law is going to help her with it, but still, she's get too much on her plate now. So I have to try to make some calls to figure out how to coordinate getting the remainder of some of this stuff done for her, because I'm not sure anyone else has considered that yet.
So that's that. It has been an emotional few days. I know, full well, that this is something I’m going to have to face with both of my parents at some point and I’ve always avoided giving it any thought. Having been put face to face with it on Saturday, I had a whole weekend where I had to ask myself how I am ever going to make it without them. Sure, I don’t see them very often, and I talk to them probably weekly, so it isn’t like they support me financially or anything, but in the back of my mind, I always know they’re that safety net I’ll always be able to count on. Imagining not having that is one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to consider. I really can't begin to imagine how I'm ever going to be able to cope with not calling my dad or my mom up on the phone and bs with them and listen to old stories about things they'd done and places they'd been or (in a rare instance of turning tables) having my dad (who along with my brother was my go-to person for cooking advice) calling ME for cooking advice. I am going to be an absolute mess, I already know it.
So for those that stuck out the entire post, thanks, I know it was kinda all over the place. And again, even though it appears he's going to be okay, any thoughts and prayers would be welcome.
tl:dr - dad had a stroke, it appears he's probably going to be just fine, and I'm now made to think about milestones in life that I don't want to think about.
Topic: A rough weekend for me... (Read 1664 times)