Continuing to Process

Excuse the longevity. I don't blame you if you don't bother reading. This is just my way of working through everything that happened.

Continued from Beginning to process..

Corvallis ICU seemed safer. Dad laid there watching tv with some wires strapped to his chest that zapped him every time his heart rate dropped below 50 bpm. It was hard to see my dad with wires hooked to him; but those wires offered comfort.

I settled into what would become quite familiar surroundings. I spent more time in hospital waiting rooms this weekend than I have probably spent in the rest of my life combined.

Somewhere during the middle of the day they put in a temporary pacemaker. Seriously why does my dad need a pacemaker, he's 45 for crying out loud. I liked the word temporary. I also liked that my dad didn't have to feel it when he got shocked

Nothing much else happened the rest of the day. Some family came. It was a nice gesture; but I learned that unless you are really really close to someone it's more annoying than anything to have people there. They try to let you know they understand and explain what God is doing, you know with all the same responses you get about God making things into something good and using things to make us stronger. I know it's all true, I thought about it all at various times so it was more annoying than anything to hear people say it like it was this magic word that would bring a jubilant peace to the wavy seas. Ha. I'll talk about this more later in a happier tone. I'm learning alot about suffering and hope.

Somewhere during the day I decided to stay the night. I stretched out on the carpet of the waiting room. You'd think they would put cots in there for people. I didn't really expect to sleep; just pretend to, so people wouldn't talk to me. I read a bit of Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms then turned off the lights.

Sometime in the night an elderly woman sat down in the other part of the room. Soon after a doctor came in. There's certain conversations you hear that seem sacred, like you don't deserve or shouldn't hear them. Such conversations would include engagement proposals, last words of the dying, etc. This was one of those. "Is my husband going to die?" It turns out the guy had pneumonia, the doctors response was uncertain.

I have never had to hear a conversation like that before. I wondered not if but when I would have to hear a conversation like that again, or be a part of one. Five minutes, five years, fifty years? I asked God alot of questions while I listened to them talk. He didn't give any answers. Sometime later I woke up to a janitor giving the room a morning clean. Lucky for him I had already cleaned the room like five times.

This morning the test results came back. All good to go. Dad would go under the knife to get a permenant pacemaker. I went and said good morning to Dad We talked about the Jamaican dude that broke the 100m world record and watched a news report on the cow pie throwing world championships.

9 AM. Dad is rolled into the OR. I walked up and down the hall thinking who knows what. A few of you got some text messages. I tried to distract myself with thoughts of other unresolved stress issues going on. How about that one, trying to think of stressful things in order to get the mind off of even more stressful things. In what seemed like a one instantaneous moment, Dad got rolled out of OR, taken to his room, we left for the house, and I took a nap.

Jess, Jordan, and I (along with my nephew Isaiah) went in this afternoon to visit dad. We all watched Isaiah jump around the room, trying to find and push every button possible. Not much to talk about, we left after an hour or so.

Things seem calm now. It's like when you have a migrane and you don't remember what it was like to ever not have a migrane. Once the migrane is gone you can't even imagine what it was like to ever have one.