Well, last week was quite a week. I got a call from my brother on Monday afternoon saying our dad was in the stroke clinic in Victoria General Hospital and was awaiting surgery for a severely blocked carotid artery. Talk about a heart-wrenching reminder of the preciousness of life. And I hereby welcome myself to the sandwich generation.
I’m still physically and emotionally exhausted from the whole thing. My husband, two boys, and I headed over to Vancouver Island first thing Tuesday morning then straight to the hospital. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to spend much time in such a setting, you can relate to the frustration that comes along with waiting for answers. For the most part the nurses and other hospital staffers deliver fantastic care, but you’re still subjected to a whole lot of confusion. Don’t even get me started on the boredom my two little ones did their best to overcome. (I think we qualify as a textbook example of members of the sandwich generation. To read more about that, click here.)
It turns out that over the preceding days my dad had been experiencing mini strokes (“transient ischemic attacks”), weird but brief episodes of numbness in his hands, garbled speech, vision troubles, confusion, and loss of balance. There are a lot of things that can lead to such symptoms in a nearly 80-year-old man. Plus, he had recently started taking insulin, which, in excess, can sometimes lead to strikingly similar effects.
Anyway, once he finally got into the stroke clinic, it became clear that those episodes were in fact the result of a blocked artery in the neck: 90-percent blocked, in fact, meaning surgery was in order, fast, to avert a major stroke. I cannot believe how lucky we are that he dodged that bullet.
If anyone you know starts having those symptoms I mentioned above, get them to the doctor or a hospital right away. Transient ischemic attacks can last for a few seconds or several hours, but they need to be treated as a medical emergency.
My dad had surgery Wednesday night, and the operation was smooth. He’ll have quite the fabulous scar stretching from behind his left ear to his collar bone, plus another one on his leg where the doctor removed a vein to insert into his neck, but other than that, he is, so far, recovering well.
I’m still thanking our lucky stars.
Despite the lousy circumstances, the experience did bring our family even closer together. We’ve agreed that we need to spend more time together, even though we’re all spread out across B.C. and Alberta.
And this kind of close call definitely puts things in perspective. All of life's trivial little headaches, arguments, and ego clashes take a back seat or, rightly, disappear altogether.
Things could have turned out much worse. We’re blessed. Exhausted, maybe, but blessed.