Daddy, Heart Attack and Thanksgiving...so how was your November?

At 4:11AM on Tuesday, November 14th our phone rang. I heard it ring, but realizing that it was still not daylight I didn't want to answer it because it was someone calling with bad news. The next thing I heard was my sister's voice in a VERY CALM manner telling me, "Lis, I need you to pick up the phone." I NEVER want to hear that phrase again in my life because it was hearing that, when my day from hell began.

My sister was calling to tell me that she had just gotten a call from the hospital in our hometown letting her know that our dad was there and had had a heart attack. All she knew other than that, was that the stubborn mule that our father is, drove himself there! Now for those of you who don't know our Daddy, he is 5'11'' and pre-November 14th, he weighed around 260 lbs. He has been on medication for high cholesterol for the last eight years and in 1998 ( I think that's when we all decided it was) he had to have two stents put in his heart for blocked arteries since he had thought he was having a heart attack back then and drove himself to the hospital. So getting the news that he was in the ER and having a heart attack was REALLY bad news.

I honestly can't remember how many phones calls went back and forth between me and my sister that day, but this is more of less how I remember the rest of Tuesday going for me...a couple of hours later Kim (my sister) called me back to tell me that she was at the hospital with Daddy and that they had to go in and put two more stents in around one of his original ones which was 99% blocked and had indeed caused a heart attack. They had him in the Cath Lab for quite a while doing that, but then they moved him to ICU where she had seen him and talked to him. I had called my boss to let him know what was happening and to tell him that I would be staying home for the rest of the day to get updates. I was having a hard time holding it together given that I was 1300 miles away from my Daddy and I couldn't SEE him and TOUCH him to know he was alright.

Around noon my sister called again with another update and said that they would let me call in to the ICU unit so I could talk to Daddy. I did just that. I only got to talk to him for a couple of minutes because he was getting groggy and started slurring his words, but just to get to hear his voice and to tell him that I loved him was worth everything in the world to me...that was until a few minutes later Kim called again. This time she was calling to tell me that after he hung up with me, Daddy threw up blood all over the room. She saw it and was scared, so imagine I was doing from my couch in New Jersey. They had called in a gastroenterologist to find out what was happening. Apparently, after years of acid reflux, having a 200+ pound ER tech pound on his chest to start his heart and having already vomited in the Cath Lab, Daddy had ripped his esophagus away from his stomach and was slowly bleeding to death. This caused major complications because his cardiologist then had to make the call to take him off of his blood thinners, which he needed in order not to throw a clot and cause another heart attack or a stroke, but which were helping him to bleed out even faster.

Again, my stubborn mule Daddy told the doctors that he was fine and that he didn't need his esophagus fixed but luckily my sister was there and had seen it all and she had Power of Attorney to tell them to fix it. They then sedated Daddy and once he was "incapable" of making his own decisions, she signed the paperwork and they stopped the bleeding. He now has two titanium clips holding his esophagus together.

I realized that things had gone from bad to worse and decided to buy a plane ticket, but the only one I could find was leaving first thing the next morning so I booked it and called my boss to tell him I had to get to Arkansas. He told me to go and not to worry about work. (Side note on the work situation - I was in the middle of transitioning to a new position with A LOT more work and was spending every day with the person whose position I was taking over...that is until I had to leave. So, instead of a two week time to soak up information and ask questions, I had three days. I'm still in the dark on most of what I am supposed to be doing, but I'll figure it out eventually.)

After talking to my sister again, it was around this time that I feel apart and told Kris I didn't care how he did it, but I needed to get to Arkansas NOW! I had already looked at plane tickets first thing in the morning, but has decided to stay put since it looked like Daddy would be alright and then I could fly down later in the week since I already had the week of Thanksgiving off because Daddy was supposed to be driving up on the Saturday after all this happened to stay with me and Kris for a week. And we had then booked the flight for me to fly out the next morning, but Kris got on the phone with the airline and found me a flight and I had less than an hour to get packed and get to the airport.

I threw some clothes in a bag, stuck on a ball cap and ran out the door. I do believe this was the first, and hopefully the ONLY, time I sat in the passenger seat of Kris' car and didn't say a word to him about how he was driving. I know at one point we were going at least 100mph down the interstate, but while he was going fast, he was also being cautious so I wasn't going to say anything.

Kris got me to the airport, in rush hour traffic in time to make my flight, but good ol Newark International had other plans for me. I think in all the times I've flown in and out of that airport there has only been one flight that hasn't been delayed...and this wasn't one of them. I went straight to the counter and while trying not to completely loose it, I explained to the ladies where I was going and why I was going there. They said they would try to move me up on the plane so I could make my connecting flight in Houston and get to Tulsa where someone, I didn't know who, was going to pick me up and drive me the hour and half back to Rogers, to the hospital.

I finally got on the plane, late of course, and told the attendant what was happening so she might be able to move me up to the front of the plane too. About that time, the lady from the gate came to my seat and moved me from the back of the plane to the row right behind First Class. She also said there would be a cart waiting for me in Houston to get me to my next flight. I was relieved for the moment, but being stuck on a plane with no way of communicating to anyone was excruciating. I got to Houston late, hopped on the cart, that didn't go anywhere for quite a while even though I had told the driver my story and the lady sitting next to me was trying to get to Arizona because her dad was in the hospital on his deathbed. I finally made it to my gate, my flight to Tulsa was late and I got to check in with everyone.

Around 11:30PM I arrived in Tulsa and my brother-in-law was there waiting to drive me to the hospital. We got there around 1:30AM and I asked the ICU night nurse if I could go back just to see Daddy. She let me in and there was my Daddy snoring up a storm looking like nothing had happened to him that day other than the IV they had in his hand and the monitor they had hooked to him. I gave him a kiss and went back out to take my place on one of the small couches in the ICU Waiting Room, where I would spend the next two days except for a couple hours at Daddy's house cleaning it and me.

Wednesday morning I got to go back and talk to him for the first time. Last thing he knew, I was not coming down until Saturday so he was a little surprised to see me. My sister and I spent the next three days trying to explain to him the sequence of events and just how bad it all was. In his mind, he just had a couple more stents put in like the first time and he'd be going home in a day. He didn't remember most of what had happened to him from the time he walked into the ER. After three days in ICU, they moved him to his own room around 10:30PM on Thursday. I went with him and thought I might go home for the night, but that didn't happen.

The night nurse wasn't the most competent thing at putting in IVs and Daddy had come out and he's not an easy stick. After she poked on him for a while and decided she couldn't do it, she got someone else. Then she had to change out his medication on his IV after I had to go tell the desk that it had run out since no one noticed that it was beeping. I didn't trust her at this point, so I check the bag to make sure they had given him the right medication. The medication was correct, but it had another patient's name on it. After seeing all that, I decided to stay the night with Daddy at the hospital.

The next day my sister and I spent about five hours trying to get Daddy's house clean since his doctor had told him he might be released over the weekend. Once we got it in the best shape we could, I headed back to the hospital and stayed the night again with him. On Saturday morning his doctor did his rounds at 7AM and by 8:30AM we were headed out the door and he was on his way home.

Now on top of having high cholesterol, having two stents already in his heart and being over weight, my Daddy is a smoker and has been since he was a teenager. Given all that plus the heart attack, two more stents, having his esophagus come loose from his stomach and finding out that all of that had triggered Type 2 diabetes and he would now have to watch what he eats, the man went home and tried to smoke a cigarette. My Daddy is a wonderful man with a heart of gold (at least the parts that aren't broken), but he really isn't the smartest man on the planet!

After being the in hospital for the better part of a week, he couldn't smoke a whole cigarette without it making him sick. That was a good thing, the fact that he was trying to at all was a very bad thing. All his doctor's told him he HAS to stop smoking, watch what he eats and loose about 30 pounds and keep it off. While I was there for the next week, he did really good about watching what he ate and checking his blood sugar when he was supposed to, but he kept trying to smoke.

Kris finally came down on Tuesday and we spent Thanksgiving week in Arkansas at Daddy's house. It turned out to be a very nice visit, other than the reason for us being there in the first place. But we were all thankful that Daddy didn't have the heart attack a week earlier when he was down in Mexico or a few days later when he would have been on the road by himself driving from Arkansas to New Jersey. He still is off work and will be probably until the end of the year. He has gotten himself a treadmill and walks on it for 10-12 minutes a day. And he now gets a daily phone call from both his daughters and I think he finally realizes just how serious all of this was.

That was our Thanksgiving. How was yours?