My Mom is seventy three and Dad just celebrated his seventy sixth birthday. Neither have led overly healthy lifestyles. Both began smoking at a very early age and their diet has always consisted of fatty foods fried in oil and heavily processed foods encrusted with sodium. Physical activity was not something either would indulge in unless it was to walk into a store to get their next pack of cigarettes. Amazingly my parents are both a fairly healthy weight but both have developed diabetes and Mom has C.O.P.D. The C.O.P.D. has limited my Mom since she is now on oxygen. Several times a year she ends up hospitalized due to lung issues. She has become frail and over the past half year or so has fallen in the home. Luckily she never was severely injured. As our parents age I think they tend to become a bit secretive about some of their health issues. When my Dad began feeling tired and out of sorts Mom believed it was simply the result of aging. She never informed us and only seeing them for short periods none of my siblings or I noticed this change. On April 24th my Mom decided to venture down to the basement to wash some laundry. She felt the urge to take some of the burden off my Dad even though she had been forbidden from going into the basement. My Dad had fallen asleep on the couch and did not notice her departure. Lucky for Mom the upstairs tenant chose that night to do laundry also for she found Mom sprawled at the bottom of the stairs. A phone call from my brother sent me and my siblings racing to the emergency room where we discovered that Mom had broken her hip. Since it was late at night and not deemed an emergency the surgery would wait for the morning when a surgeon would be available to evaluate her. We were all stressed but I did not like the way my Dad was looking. In the morning my brother informed me that the surgeon had decided to do the procedure using a spinal instead of general anesthesia because of my mother's breathing issues. Dad was at the hospital with Mom and we all would meet at the hospital following the surgery. Things did not work quite the way we expected. When Mom was wheeled into surgery Dad decided he was going to go home and rest as he did not feel well. Upon crossing the parking lot he located his car but began sweating profusely. He grabbed his cell phone and phoned my brother who immediately recognized that Dad was in trouble. Not wanting to break the connection my brother hit his Onstar button. With their assistance hospital personal, police and rescue were able to locate our Dad and rush him into the emergency room. My siblings and I quickly arrived at the hospital to discover that Dad had suffered a heart attack. The cardiologist on call was able to prevent major damage from occurring by doing a heart catheterization while we alternated between the cath lab waiting area and the surgical waiting area.
In one brief twelve hour period the events that occurred changed almost everything about my daily life. Of course it changed my parents lives and the lives of my siblings as well. All "in the blink of an eye".
