Family Affair: The Story

So this post is long overdue. I had intentions of writing this story when these events started taking place. However, I got busy and distracted with life. At this time, I was expecting my first child and working.

I am going to try to recall the details of this story to the best of my abilities but as I stated above, it has been awhile. So let me take you back to December of 2012.

Back in December, prior to going on Christmas leave, I received a call from my mom telling me that my uncle, my dad’s brother, was in critical condition with an infection. I knew my uncle had been sick and not feeling well as he had been suffering from colon problems. I spoke with my uncle a couple weeks prior and he had explained to me that he was going to have a colonoscopy to figure out what the problem was.

My uncle had found out from the colonoscopy that he had a blockage in the colon. Rather than do an immediate surgery, the doctor put it off for several or more days. Before the weekend was out, my uncle became severely sick and had his ex-wife take him to the emergency room. Turns out the blockage in his colon had caused his colon to rupture. As a result, everything that is supposed to pass through one’s colon was going into his chest cavity causing a major infection. The stuff that was leaking into his chest was getting on his lungs making the infection worse and breathing an issue. He had to be put on respirators and strong antibiotics.

Even after being on antibiotics for the first few days, he wasn’t improving the way the doctors would like to see. At this point our family was really worried about what the outcome would be. I really couldn’t do much since I was still in Hawaii.

My husband and I arrived in Utah in mid December for leave. My uncle had been in the hospital for a couple weeks at that point. Well on the day we arrived my uncle had suffered a major stroke. Initially we were told by my uncle’s ex-wife that the stroke was minor. Unfortunately, she was wrong. Part of the confusion I think is due to the fact that she didn’t understand what was really going on. Due to my father’s experience, we were more educated on how bad a stroke could be. My mom was able to reach a doctor at the hospital who explained to my mom that it was a major stroke. The doctors found that my uncle had the same hole in his heart that my dad had, causing a clot to pass through the hole and reach his brain. When we asked about what his prognosis would be, no one could give us an answer because he still had the infection. We were told that even if the infection subsided it would be hard to tell what his condition would be until rehab.

Following the stroke, my uncle was paralyzed on the left side. He also couldn’t talk but we aren’t sure if that was due to the stroke or the respirators. Eventually he would gain back his speech and mobility. However, I am told that he doesn't have feeling in his fingers. Once his infection turned around, he went into a rehab center to get back to where he needed to be physically. 

One day I was at a retreat in Waikiki with my husband when I received a phone call from my uncle. He never randomly called me. When I answered the phone, I had never heard him so happy. He was asking me so many questions and just wanted to check in. 

That following July, we came to visit. My family got together so they could meet my daughter. He seemed great when I saw him. Unfortunately, my uncle couldn't go back to work. Due to the stroke, he wasn't allowed to drive for awhile and he was a truck driver.  He decided to sell his townhouse and move into an apartment.  About a year after his stroke, he chose to distance himself from the family. I have not seen him since that July. My other uncle sees him when he visits my grandma. My other uncle has to tread lightly because anything can set my uncle off. It is common for there to be personality changes in a person when there is trauma to a person's brain. As sad as it makes, me I understand that it is due to the stroke. I hope that it will not continue to be this way forever. I want my daughter to have a relationship with her great uncle. I am just grateful that the outcome for my uncle was not worse.

Family Affair

Coming soon

A Bump On the Head

I had plan to write a series of posts but I have been very busy since my husband came back from Afghanistan. However, I thought I should explain a little hiccup my dad has experienced recently.

Starting in February my dad had been having several falls. Well one day he went to get his hair cut. On his way into the salon my dad had two falls. During the first fall, some patrons were kind enough to help him up but before he could even make it inside he managed to fall again. At this point the patrons called 911. They also were kind enough to call my mom and tell her what was going on. When my mom arrived the paramedics were there. Rather than go by ambulance, my parents opted to have my mom take him to the hospital. My dad was admitted into the ER. My mom felt that my dad should have an MRI. The ER doctors didn't feel that it was necessary to have one done since he had one two weeks prior after having sustained an injury during another fall. My mom didn't feel right about that so she called my dad's rehabilitation doctor (I am unsure of what her actual title is) who sent in the order for an MRI.

In the meantime, I called my uncles to make them aware of the situation. I honestly thought that the doctors would just patch up my dad and send him on his way like the last time. However, that was not the case. When I got off the phone with my uncle, my mom called me with an update. It turns out that my dad had bleeding in the brain. The doctors had my dad transferred from Alta View Hospital to Intermountain Medical Center. Within 24 hours my dad was to have brain surgery. It isn't easy being 3,000 miles away from your family during an event like this. There wasn't anything I could have done but being in Hawaii made me feel so helpless. All I could do is wait to see if I needed to fly home.

In the middle of a conversation with my mom she had to go because they decided to take my dad into surgery right away. What I would have imagined to be a long surgery only lasted a little over 40 minutes. About a half hour after surgery my mom was able to give me an update. In addition to the bleeding in the brain, they found a large subdermal hematoma (blood clot). Blood clots are what causes one of the types of strokes a person can have for those who don't know. This large clot would have normally stroked him out or even have killed him but luckily the clot was in the already dead part of father's brain from his initial stroke back in 2007. When the doctors went to relieve the pressure in his brain from the bleeding, the pressure was able to push out the blood clot. My dad had to have shunts in his  head for 24 hours. The doctors were surprised how well the surgery went. I was really surprised that I was talking to my dad 30 minutes after surgery.

Due to the severity of the situation, my mom had the American Red Cross send a message to my husband's unit. The Army granted my husband ten days of leave and paid for our plane tickets to go home and be with my dad. I am so thankful that the Army supported us during this stressful time. Without their help, I would not have been able to go home. Tickets were listed as 2,000 dollars per person and there was no way I could have afforded that.

My dad is now up and about like nothing ever happened. However, we have noticed that my dad's already poor short term memory is even worse. In spite of that he is doing really well.

Tomorrow, May 3rd, marks 5 years from when my dad had his stroke. It has been a long bumpy road but we are still staying on course. We have no control over what life throws us, but we have control over how we handle it. I have really come to admire the strength of my family. I love them with all my heart--imperfections and all.

All Rainbows and Unicorns

My Superheroes story was written in Fall of 2007. It has now been four and half years since my dad's stroke. I wish I could tell you that life is all rainbows and unicorns but that simply isn't true. There are bad days and good days. I would like to be all inspiring and tell you that we have found a way to rise above it all but that fact is we are human. We haven't risen above it. We may put on a happy face but it just masks the pain.

I am constantly asked how my dad is and how my family is handling it. While I truly appreciate those who genuinely care, I have to tell you that I hate that question. How am I supposed to answer that question? He isn't dying but he isn't great either. How do you explain to someone that my dad had to learn to walk again, and learn to live with the use of only one hand while the other just hangs from the shoulder, and his ability for driving has been limited? He can no longer play the guitar, go backpacking by himself, or have normal cognitive reasoning like the rest of us have. The things he once loved to do, have now become challenges. He is no longer the person he wishes he was. I can see it in his eyes how badly he wishes he could go back five years.

Sometimes when people have asked me that question I have actually answered "he's alive." I know how lucky I am that he is alive when he could have died. I try to tell myself each day that I should appreciate what I have while others have lost or are losing their loved ones. I know that there are people out there who are in worse situations than the one I am in. However, this does not console me. I really try and then when I get upset or down on myself, I just feel guilty about how ungrateful I am being. But frankly, I am just so angry.

My father's stroke has affected me on so many levels that I can't begin to delve into the specifics. I ask myself and "God" why this happened all the time. Is there some important lesson that I am supposed to learn? If there is, I haven't found it yet. Someone recently told that God doesn't let things happen to people who can't handle them. I think that is some one's way of making them feel better about what comes their way. Honestly, I don't know how much more I can bend before I break. But if what this person says is true, God has a lot more faith in me than I do in myself and in him.

Despite all the anger and sadness, I keep on keeping on. I wake up each morning and take on the day. I love my family so much and I am so thankful for having them. I try to look at the positive and appreciate the improvements and the accomplishments that my dad makes. And although today may not be all rainbows and unicorns, I try to remind myself that tomorrow will be.

Conclusion to only the Beginning

I wrote this story for a class in fall of 2007. I thought after a year of not posting, that I should finish the story. It has been 4 years since my dad's stroke so I thought now would be a good time to move forward and tell you what has been happening since this story ended.

Stay Tuned...

Now back to the story

My dad had finally progressed to a point where he could go up and down the stairs. In the beginning, he always had to have someone watching him. When he would go down the stairs, he would have to go down facing backwards. Since my dad was still paralyzed in the left arm, we had to put a railing on the right wall also, since the railing we had was on his left side.

One day my boyfriend(now my husband) and I were hanging out at my house. My dad was upstairs hanging out and my mom was cleaning. My dad decided that he wanted to go downstairs. My mom was busy and had asked us to help him down the stairs. I asked my boyfriend to watch from behind and I would watch from the front. I figured that if I were to watch from the back and he were to fall, I would go down with him. It was image that I didn’t find appealing. I watched my dad has he gripped the railing firmly with his right hand. He would slowly swing his left leg out and backward and then would lower his left leg down onto the next step. His right leg was obviously moving more smoothly than the left leg. My eyes became filled with tears. I was happy that my dad was getting his life back, but I assumed the first time I was helping someone walk up the stairs for the first time, that someone would be my child. I couldn’t get the image of my dad in his hiking boots, wearing his cowboy hat with his backpack strapped on out of my mind. This man could hike for miles, and now he is struggling to go down the stairs. It was a slap in the face. Last year my dad made a comment that he wanted to get all the backpacking in he could because he thought it might be his last year to go. I thought that he was silly for making that comment. How could someone with his determination and physical stamina not go up in the mountains for at least five more years to come? Maybe in the back of his mind he knew there would be a reason why he wouldn’t go this year.

I considered my dad’s stroke to be a cruel joke that someone was playing. He couldn’t go hiking, fishing, bowling, or even play the guitar. All of which are his favorite things. If his family were to be taken away, he would be completely stripped of the things he loved. Despite the outcome, I have yet to hear him complain or put himself down. He has never told me that he would never be able to do something. We already have plans to go camping next summer. He even speaks about when he will be able to play the guitar again.

Although his determination has been beneficial in his recovery, it has also been a hazard. One day my mom caught my dad trying to climb a ladder by himself. Another time when I was over at my parents, my dad had tried to turn on the gas fire place. My mom was cooking breakfast so we were all upstairs eating. When my dad was done eating he went downstairs. When he made it down the stairs he told us he could smell gas.  Within taking two steps down the stairs, I was overwhelmed with the smell of gas. My mom ran downstairs and turned off the gas. I opened every window and door in the house to air the gas out. It was so bad they were afraid to turn on a light in fear that it would cause a spark and blow up. To make matters worse, it was cold and raining. So while we were trying to air out the house, we were freezing our asses off. Luckily since then, he has been making better decisions. 

My dad’s condition is slowly improving but at least it is improving. The next obstacle we are all facing is a financial one. Since we have been home, the medical transport company has been trying to charge us sixteen-thousand dollars. That is double the amount they told us we would have to pay. If we didn’t have eight-thousand dollars then, how in the hell would we come with eight-thousand more. Then another company threatened to send us to collections because we didn’t pay the bill. My mom explained to them that we never received the bill. When she asked where they were sending the bill, it turned out they had mailed the check to our insurance company. Why the insurance company didn’t forward the bill to us, I have no idea. Since we had not paid the bill they wanted to charge us seventeen-hundred dollars. My mom was so frustrated with what she was hearing that she yelled at the company for how they were handling the situation. As a result, they arranged for her to only pay the original five-hundred dollars. With my dad out of work and my mom having retired in March, money was tight. Both my brother and I ended up having to get additional loans for school. I even had to get more financial aid from school to help out with the rest of my tuition.

Seven months have past since my dad has had his stroke. It feels like a year has gone by. Where we will be in year is unpredictable and it feels like it will be a lifetime before life is back to normal.

The truth of the matter is there are no superheroes, just people. And villains can come in any form-- even a stroke. No one lives forever and everyone can feel pain. People can sense it, people can feel it.  We want to believe nothing bad will happen to our parents and that they will live forever. But even though parents aren’t superheroes, they are still heroes. They show us who we want to be and who we don’t want to be. They help us overcome our weaknesses to find our strengths. They may not live forever, but my “super” heroes will live on in me.

 

Adjusting

For as long as I can remember my dad was strong and could do anything. I always felt that nothing would ever happen to him, and he would live forever. Now that he was home, it was like he had regressed to a child. This is a perception that children rarely see of their parents.


He needed help with all the basics like changing and eating etc.. I am not so used to seeing him so vulnerable. For safety reasons, my mom bought baby monitors to put in the family room just in case he needed us in the middle of the night.

For the first few weeks we always had to make sure someone was home with him because it was too risky leaving him by himself. However, one day we made an exception. My mom and I had to drop off the car at the mechanic. My brother was at work so he wasn’t available to stay home. We told my dad that we would be back in fifteen minutes since the mechanic was located nearby. My mom specifically told him not to get out of the chair and to wait until we got home.

Fifteen minutes later we were back home. We walked into the house and my dog greeted us with his usual hyper self. I can’t remember who walked into the room first, but I remember seeing my dad on the floor in front of the laundry room. I could feel the anxiety immediately. My mom and I quickly picked him up and off of the floor. My mom scolded my dad. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is how it would be forever. Thankfully that was his last fall. However, he scared himself enough that he would walk around with a helmet wherever he would go. Half the time he would not even buckle it on so I would not even see the point of him wearing it. My mom would tell me that he would use it for confidence so I shouldn’t make fun of him. I figured I wouldn’t say anything because I wasn’t the one going out in public with him.

Rehabilitation

By the time he had arrived at Health South, he had begun to regain movement and feeling in his left leg. With this improvement they were going to work on teaching him to walk again. Even with the new movement in his legs, he was still going to have to rely on a wheel chair for awhile.


Every so often they were going to allow home visits. We had made changes to our house so that he could stay in the basement, which was accessible by our garage, so he would not have to rely on going upstairs. By the end of May and the beginning of June we had finished remodeling our upstairs. My dad wanted to see the finished upstairs but he still could not go up the stairs. My spilt-level home was located on a hill. If a person were to enter the house from the front, there would be two sets of stairs; one going up and one going down. However, if a person were to enter from the backyard, they would upstairs. So to get my dad upstairs, we had to wheel him into our backyard and take him through the back door. To take him through the back door we had to lift him up two steep stairs. We did not have a board sturdy enough to make a ramp. Once he was done looking at our new living room, we took him out the same way we brought him in.

It was the first time in my life where we all had to take care of my dad. When I was little, he would carry me to bed. When we were in the mountains, and I would think we were lost, he would lead the way. I had to do everything to keep myself from crying. This was not my dad and this is not who he wanted to be.

A couple weeks went by and my dad’s walking improved. He moved on from a walker to a cane that he still uses today. Health South was ready to release my dad home. My dad would still have therapy but it would all be done from our house.

I was relieved to have him in the house again. Due to his physical condition he would still not be able to go up and down the stairs for awhile. My dad normally would spend most of his time downstairs watching TV or working in his office anyway. Since we knew this would be where he would be most comfortable, we made a place in the family room for a twin size bed for him. We set a lamp at the top of his bed and hooked it up to a push button hanging on the wall. That way he could turn on and off the light without having to find his way in the dark. Any type of fall could seriously agitate his condition.