Here's What Happened

On January 4th of this year, TheMister's cell phone rang around 2 PM. He said, "Oh, hi L-Mom!...Oh my god...is he okay?"

I thought, "Holy crap, Dad accidentally cut a fingertip or something off again."

TheMister said, "Yeah, no problem. I'll call J-Sis and HalfSis and let them know what's going on. I'll take care of it."

I thought, "Oh my god, Dad's DEAD!"

I sat there in tense silence, my heart racing, trying to figure out what the hell was going on based only on his side of the conversation.

After what seemed like a half hour, but was more like 2 minutes, he got off the phone.

He said, "Okay, that was your mom... She said that your dad had a small stroke this morning, but they're at the hospital right now and he seems to be doing better."

I said, "OH. MY. GOD."

He told me he was sorry he didn't tell me what was going on during the phone call, but he figured my mom had about 2 minutes of coherant speech in her before she lost it and he wanted to get all the information he could. He then called J-Sis and let her know what was going on. When it came time to call HalfSis, we realized that neither of us had her current phone number. Oops! We decided to go over to my parents' house to get HalfSis's number from their address book. We threw the puppy in the truck and drove over there.

It was very quiet when we got there. I got their address book out of the drawer where it's kept while TheMister looked around to make sure there wasn't anything that my mom wouldn't want to see when she got home. Sawyer kept running down the hallway looking for Grandma and Grandpa. TheMister found the package the nasal cannula came in on the bed and threw it away. Then he made(ish) the bed.

TheMister decided we should take their address book to the hospital with us, so we stuck it in a Ziploc bag. Then he went through the pockets of my dad's jeans and found his wallet, so we could take that as well. He asked, "Does your dad wear glasses?" I told him he did, and that he had glasses all over the house. TheMister grabbed one of the pairs of glasses off the living room table and stuck them in the bag with the address book and wallet.

We finally decided things looked okay and headed to Panera for some sandwiches, since we were hungry and TheMister thought that my mom would probably not have taken the time to eat anything with everything that was going on. After we left Panera we stopped at home and dropped Sawyer off so we could head to the hospital to see if anyone needed anything.

We started at Bronson's ER, but found out that my dad had been moved to the ICU, so we headed up there. On the way to the ICU, we saw my mom using a computer, getting ready to send out an e-mail letting people know what was going on. As soon as she saw us, she started crying. She said, "I was doing fine until I saw you guys." TheMister hugged her for a minute while she cried and then she calmed down a bit. We all sat down in some chairs in a waiting area and she told us what happened...

Around 12:30 PM, my dad tried to get out of bed and his left leg sort of gave out, causing him to fall into his dresser and hit his head, which left a pretty good bruise on his right ear. Then, being my dad and thinking his leg must have been asleep or something, he thought he'd get back in bed and try again a few minutes later. When he tried again, his leg gave out again and he fell into the mirrored closet doors. After a third try at getting up, my mom finally convinced him that if he fell all the way to the floor, there was no way she could pick him up all by herself, so he let her call an ambulance.

Once he got to the hospital, he was diagnosed with a hemorrhagic stroke, probably caused by high blood pressure. His blood pressure was 220/something when he first came in and had been in the HIGH range for about 10 years before that. Using two different blood pressure meds, the doctor finally got his blood pressure down to a reasonable number shortly before we got there.

After the doctor placed his central line, we were able to go into his room. It was kind of disconcerting and upsetting to see how little control he had over the left side of his body when we first got there. His speech was very slurred and it made him difficult to understand. A minute after we got there, we told him we had glasses for him, which he was happy to hear. Luckily, TheMister had grabbed his actual glasses and not reading ones, so he was finally able to see for the first time in several hours. The doctor came into the room to check on him and let us know what was going on. He said that where he bled in his brain is the best place to have a stroke, if you could control where you had one. It was in the right rear part of his head. There aren't a lot of functions that are controlled by the brain right there, so it’s easier to come back from.

About 45 minutes after we got there, they took him for a CT scan with contrast. While he was gone for that, TheMister, my mom and I sat down to eat the sandwiches we had brought from Panera. We were all pretty hungry by then.

When he came back into the room, the doctor told us that based on the CT scan he had shortly after he was admitted and the one he had just had with contrast dye, they determined that the bleed hadn't gotten any worse in that time. He said the brain is really not a big fan of free-floating blood and that if there wasn't any actual damage to the brain, my dad would probably get better as the blood was absorbed.

By the time J-Sis and her hubby got there, Dad had more control over the left side of his body, his speech was slightly less slurred and he had stopped accusing my mom of hiding his left hand where he couldn't find it. We left there around 6 PM so Dad could rest, since he seemed tired.

He ended up staying in the ICU for a few days before being moved to the stroke unit. After a few days in the stroke unit, he was moved to the Inpatient Stroke Rehabilitation Unit at Borgess, where he spent two weeks. Doctors originally told him that it would take about 6 months of hard work to get everything functioning normally again. He was actually doing much, much better after two weeks of having both Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy twice a day. He was released to go home on January 23rd.

He's doing much better now. He even cleared himself to drive to physical therapy last week because my mom was sick and couldn't. It's almost miraculous that he's doing as well as he is, but it's probably due in large part to his stubbornness and determination and to his body's amazing ability to continually heal itself from whatever he's done to it. It's also due to my mom being able to convince him that she should call an ambulance within an hour or so of the stroke.

Everyone who reads this should go to the following link to get information on how to recognize a stroke: http://www.strokeassociation.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=1020 Knowing this information could save your life or the life of someone you love.

There. Finally. Done. It only took me 8 days to finish this entry.