Family emergency brings deeper reunion
| Monday, May 18 2009 11:20 AM
Last Updated Monday, May 18 2009 11:20 AM
The last weekend of April was one that my husband and I had looked forward to for months. Our theater professors from the college where we met and earned our degrees were retiring at the end of the school year, and their students through the decades and from all over the country were planning to come together in Dallas, to celebrate this remarkable and beloved couple who had formed our education and influenced our adulthood. My husband and I requested days off and plotted a whirlwind itinerary for our trip. We were going to visit many friends, some of whom we hadn't seen in 25 years, the kind of low-maintenance friends whom you can neglect forever and still be comfortable and close to when you see them.
And we did have an emotional reunion over that weekend ... except that it wasn't in Dallas. It was in Los Angeles, where my parents live and where my siblings and I, along with our families, met around my father's hospital bed.
If you've ever known someone in end-stage heart failure, you know the roller coaster ride that has been churning up my family's stomachs for the past two weeks. The joy of good news and the sadness of bad news come around the corner at dizzying speeds. My father has had a bad heart, and yet has remained active, for so many years that I think we all forgot that it was ticking away towards crisis.
On the Monday before our Dallas reunion, my dad was taken by ambulance to the emergency room when he couldn't catch his breath. When my mother came back to see him a few hours later, he was on a ventilator. He had apparently become unresponsive. His heartbeat had gone crazily erratic and he had turned blue. His blood pressure had plummeted and had to be maintained by intravenous medication. His prognosis was grave. By Friday he was sedated, hooked up to a feeding tube, and indicating multiple organ failure. Every problem he had was making every other problem worse. It was as though the planets were aligning, but in a bad way.
My two brothers, my sister and my daughter flew to L.A. from Oregon. The grandchildren gathered. Over the weekend we were told to measure the rest of my father's lifetime in days. The hospital staff weaned him off sedation in the hope that he could communicate with us. Per his wishes, they gradually took him off the ventilator, the feeding tube and the blood pressure medication. On Sunday, we sat together with my dad's doctor in a hospital conference room in the Critical Care Unit and thought this was the day all children dread. But here's the miracle: On the following day, my dad was awake. He was eating Jell-O and kidding with his cardiologist and talking about the Lakers. He's still terribly weak, and his heart cannot be repaired, but he is still with us.
Our reunion weekend was quite different from the one we expected. My husband and I were touched by an evening phone call from Dallas, during which we got the chance to talk to a parade of dear friends who passed the phone around. It was strange and yet heartwarming to note that voices never seem to change: The middle-aged people who greeted us sounded exactly the same as they did when they were 21. I pictured their young adult selves, even as we compared children who are themselves older than we were in our glorious college days. My husband and I were happy to be able to participate in the university festivities from afar.
Our family reunion, although brought about by a wrenching reason, was the silver lining to the cloud of our dad's ill heart. We six siblings have mended some fences and softened some hard feelings in the face of our dad's health crisis, which I know my mother was glad to see. My husband and I were able to hug all four of our daughters in one room, which is a rare treasure. The extended family connected on a level that was deep and meaningful, even if it wasn't always pleasant. We were alternately prayerful and giddy, exhausted and holding each other up, as we spent an unlikely week together.
I expected to end this column with news of my father's death, but he has amazed his doctors and is holding his own. We are overjoyed for the present; leery of the future. My dad has gone from the CCU to a regular room, from imminent heart failure to pancakes for breakfast, from a ventilator to physical therapy. He is not out of the woods, and may never actually exit the forest, but he seems to have more days and weeks and maybe even months ahead. He enfleshes the idea that every day is a sweet gift from God and should not be taken lightly or wasted. He is a testimony to the power of the prayer that was offered for him by so many loving hearts. Our gratitude is not big enough to thank all of the people in all of our lives who have been so overwhelmingly kind and spiritually generous.
And so life goes on, each day a careful premise, a gentle victory.
