It's Amazing --How One Tiny Blood Vessel Can Throw So Many People's Lives Into Complete Disarray...

Part One...

Warning:  This will be rather long and somewhat emotional --it will also have some medical details.  If you don't want to read it all through, our family will covet your prayers for my dad's complete recovery and our strength to help him and to continue to fight a very euthanistic system. 

My mother's health has not been good for quite a few years.  My brothers and I have tried (as much as one can prepare) to prepare ourselves for that dreaded call in the middle of the night from dad. ....

Well in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday September 28th, our phone rang and I stumbled out to the livingroom in a half awake state.  On the phone was my mom, calling close to paniced, but loaded with adrenaline to let me know that the EMS (Emergency Services) --about 12 of them she thought were "hauling your dad out of here in an ambulance right now."

This is my dad who is never noticable sick.  As mom says if he does ever get anything, he just has to wiat a minute and its over and he's back to his usual activities.  We realized neither of us had ever even known of him to take a Tylenol, he is always well. 

My mom is pretty close to being a shut in, because she can walk a bit but can't do stairs and they live in a townhouse upstairs.  Dad was in the process of helping to finish a handicapped accesible renovation in the downstairs so they could move down there and at least mom could get outside.  He had spent Weednesday painting a ceiling and then had gone out to eat with mom at my brothers' home.  They had a nice time and came home and as dad was falling asleep in the recliner he kind of mummbled, "no one ever thinks anything can be wrong with me."   Then around 4:30 in the morning mom was in the bathroom and heard him throwing up.  She didn't worry too much cause he never gets sick, but came out a couple minutes later to find that he was not really breathing and she couldn't wake him.  So she called 911. 

It turns out he was choking on his tongue, becasue he was having a stroke.  She feels so badly that she didn't figure this out and give him oxygen.  She did try to lift his head cause she thought he'd been throwing up, but could not. 

My brothers got there almost as fast as the ambulance and beat the ambulance to the hospital. 

First it was a stroke then they told us an anerism, then they weren't sure we'd have to wait, but "if I (who live about 8 hours away) wanted to see him alive again I better get up there RIGHT NOW."

We threw our wet clothes out of the wahser in a laundry basket, got the kids together quickly, they were all up by now, and then realized our van's check engine light was on, and we had absolutely no money to fix it.  We called our cell group leader from church, he suggested a mechanic to go to for such an emergency and siad he'd pay for it until we got back and got Kevin's MIA paycheck.  We rushed over there and it was an easy fix and were on our way.  I thought about flying but to where they live it really wouldn't have been that much faster with changes of planes and what not.  We got pulled over within 20 minutes of leaving by a state trooper and I (non-emotional being that I usually am) burst into tears and told him why we were doing 20 miles over the speed limit.  He told us dad needed us to get there alive and slow down and did not write us a ticket --thank the Lord.  We slowed down just a little.

We were out of cell phone range most of the trip, but stopped and called from a couple places along the way. 

It turned out that there are a variety of ways that a body can have a stroke and my healthy father's brain chose the worst option.  He burst a tiny blood vessel deep in the right lobe of his brain, in the Thalmus region causing a lot of blood to go all over the place doing a lot of damage. 

By the time we got there he was in the intensive care unit, hooked up to a lot of machines.  They had done an operation to put a ventriculostomy into his head to drain out the blood and cerebral fluid and try to relieve some of the pressure.  We were superficially relieved to see that they managed to do the operation without sacrificing too much of his long hair that he is quite proud of.  He looked so helpless lying there depending on all those medical machines for his very life.  They told us his diagnosis an "intracerebral hemorrhagic stroke" causing a severe Traumatic Brain Injury.  I never heard of this kind of stroke, only the kind where there is a blood clot that stops the blood and thus oxygen to the brain.  Hemorrhagic strokes account for about 17% of all storkes and have a variety of causes.  THis type of stroke is more common in younger stroke victims and has a very high mortality rate in the first 30 days.  Statistics told us that if a patient survies the first 30 days they have about a 10% chance of a reasonably decent recovery!  That is what we are still going for.