FINALLY !

Wow!  It's been way too long since I've posted!  Things came up w/ moving that I just didn't foresee - another story, another time... for right now, I want to write a Dad post :

"When an abdominal aortic aneurysm ruptures, doctors say, the chance of survival is about 10 to 20 %"  Healthquest magazine

I was reading this article in a magazine - saw this statement -and it brought me right back ....

Dad had one of these.  The docs said they couldn't treat it under 5 cm (or whatever the size was) and his was a 4.  With everything else he had going on, it wasn't too much in my thoughts, honestly ...

On this particular morning, I had a $30 check to cash.  And then I was going out to breakfast.  Now, of all the restaurant meals Dad loved, he never liked going out for breakfast.  Therefore, I set his breakfast up on the table, wrote him a note, checked him again (still sleeping like the white-haired angel he was!), and headed out ...

... and I get to the bank and - I can't believe it. I'm cursing myself.  Literally.  I don't have the dammed check!  Now how did that happen?!!!

I drive all the way back to the house.  The dammed check is sitting on the table!  Oh!  He's sitting up in bed.  Ok ...I'll just go in to tell him where I'm going and

"Faucet" he says

I'm thinking bathroom faucet and as I turn to go into the bathroom to check, he waves and points to his nose.  And coughs and explains his nose has been running like a bloody faucet and um always very modest the other end too.  WHAT?!!

And then he says, "St. Peter's."  He was bleeding and feeling so poorly, all he wanted was a Catholic hospital - he figured he was dying!  So that meant no 911.  I would have to drive him --

-- which was harrowing.  I literally thought he was going to die in the car!  I tried to pull into another hospital, but he grabbed my arm and said "No!" 

He had blown the stomach aneurysm.  It was so severe that I had to sign consent papers leaning up against someone's back or a wall, and a doctor had to rush in, dressed for an event in a tuxedo, and the surgery had to be done in the emergency room - they couldn't even wait for an operating room.  And all the blood he lost!  Do I recall correctly hearing something like 400 cc?!  It was a 12 hour day in which I thought I was going to lose him, and thank God, I did not (not then) ...

And here's the thing that has always, always stuck w/ me:  when I told the doctor the sequence of events in the morning ... he said that if I hadn't forgotten the check - if I had cashed it and gone to breakfast as planned - I would have come home and found him passed away.

I like to think my late mother, or someone, took that check out of my purse, because it wasn't his time.