My Mom.
It seems like it’s been like months since Thanksgiving at this point, even though it’s been only a little over a week. This last week has been unusually rough. I’ll spare you the gory details of most of it, but here’s the run-down: two broken down cars (and a $3000 total bill… have fun in Disneyland, Mr. Mechanic!), two sick kids with two different illnesses… and what this post is ultimately about: my mother’s quadruple bypass surgery this morning.
Last Thursday night, I received an email from my sister that my mother, a school teacher in rural east Texas, was admitted to the hospital with pain in her chest and arm and was going to be kept overnight. Her originally-scheduled-for-today stress test was moved forward to Friday morning.
On Friday morning, I received another email that she was not having a stress test, but rather a heart cath, and probably would be needing angioplasty or a stent. Now, my father had had this same thing done just a few days before Thanksgiving, and felt great. He was throwing the football around with my boys and having a good time. So when I heard that my mom was about to go through the same thing, I wasn’t too concerned… no big deal.
About 11:30 on Friday, my wife called my cell phone and told me that the blockage was worse than they thought, and in a bad position in the arteries… and that meant that bypass was necessary. Let me note quickly that my grandfather, her father, died as a result of this same disease, at a much younger age than she is now. Needless to say, she was terrified of this surgery, and we were also.
I rented a car (mine was already in the shop at this point) but before I made it out of town, I was told that the surgery was rescheduled for Monday.
This presented a problem. I am scheduled to fly to Chicago tomorrow for a conference. Since I had already rented the car for the weekend, I decided to come up here anyway and spend the weekend, and stay through the surgery.
That brings us to today.
I was at the hospital before the sun came up, so that I could be there before my mom went into the operating room. The next six hours were among the most emotional and gut-wrenching I have ever experienced in my life, and I’m still not in very good shape.
As we sat there and waited, there were two sets of phones. One was a set that people from outside of the hospital could call and talk to people in the families. Early on in the morning, about 30 minutes after we had gotten the word that the surgery had begun, I had to take one of these calls… before I knew that it wasn’t the doctor. As I walked to the phone, I just knew something went wrong and that I was about the be the guy that got the bad news. Instead, it was just one of my mom’s friends calling to check on us. A nice enough gesture, but I told everyone that I wasn’t answering that _______ phone again.
The other phone was manned by a nice lady at a desk in the waiting room. Shortly after taking the call I just mentioned, I was told that that was the phone that the doctor’s would call on, and would probably call every hour or so to give us an update. From that point on, any time that phone would ring, my stomach would drop… and I would just hope that it was good news for one of the other families.
We got two update calls. Both times, my stepfather answered the phone, listened for about 30 seconds, hung up and turned to us with a thumbs up. Everything is going good.
The third call came about 1:30. My stepfather took the phone, and listened for about ten seconds and then leaned on the wall. And kept listening. For more than 30 seconds. Every second beyond what it would take to say, “she’s fine”, was absolute, honest-to-God torture. As I watched him listening, leaning against the wall, not moving, nodding… anything, I began to dread the news I was almost sure I was about to get. Finally, he returned to the area where we were sitting and told us that the bypass was over, she was functioning on her own, and that they were in the process of closing her up.
Good news.
I went outside, sat in the front seat of my rental car, and broke. All of the emotion building up over the morning took over. I don’t think it was joy. Relief, maybe? Hope returning. I broke down again an hour or so later after seeing her in the ICU, still not conscious, colorless, and tubes coming out of her mouth.
Let me finish with this: I am not what you would call “in shape” or healthy. I am overweight, and at 31, I already take medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I am well on my way to my own bypass. My wife has told me over and over, if I won’t do the right thing for myself… then do it for her and our three kids. Those have been hollow words… until today.
I can’t and won’t put them through what I went through today. I don’t want my wife, or my sons, or my daughter to ever have to sit in an uncomfortable chair and dread the ringing of a phone.
