Reasons To Take Care Of Yourself

On Thursday my mother called me to let me know that my father was in the hospital. This was a bit of a long time in coming. Since they've been traveling (including their visit to Philly) my father's breathing was, shall we say, constantly wheezy. They (my parents) were relatively optimistic about the length of his stay...mainly that they thought he would be out by Saturday. So I went to work on Friday and then headed down to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania where they had been staying in preparation for a matriarchal family reunion of sorts in Gettysburg that weekend. The hospital food shown above is what my father had for lunch, or perhaps it was dinner, on Saturday. See, because there was no way they were letting him out that easy. I've been down there since...well, except that now I'm back in Philadelphia...but they're still in Chambersburg and will probably be there until at least Friday...or maybe tomorrow. I'm a little unclear.

I've never had so much hospital visiting experience and I won't lie, it's not so fun. Not so fun to wait for hours or days for some idea of what's going on or happening, not so fun to see a parent all connected to IVs, oxygen and the like, not so fun to see the non-hospitalized parent deal with the fact that their spouse is in the hospital. In the end it was serious but not as serious as it could have been or, if life changes aren't implemented, could be. Basically (and Dad, forgive me if you want this private) it goes like this: some time in the last months or years my father had a heart attack that was not attended to or diagnosed as such. Since then he's been walking around with a less than perfect ticker. The wheezy-ness we noted earlier was a sign of his heart working too hard, beating too fast and irregularly. There was serious talk for a few days of splents and by-pass surgery that really freaked all of us out, especially since they were in a town not their own. It's a strange thing to have to deal with this kind of stress and worry and not have a proper home to return to at the end of visiting hours. There will be more posts because food was still eaten and the family reunion did go on and I, more than my mother, did participate...but yeah, after a much talked about and twice delayed test it turns out that though my father's heart is damaged in multiple places it's not damaged enough to be treated surgically. Which, as we understand it, is a good thing.