I just received word that my dad has had a stroke, but there’s a lucky aspect in all of this. That’s that one of his medications is likely to have caused it and the symptoms should go away. He’s having a bit of trouble speaking and moving, but his brain is fully intact. Therefore, it is less o a worry because he’s been like that for a few hours and nothing has gotten worse. The reason he has not already been through an MRI today is because you can’t have a pacemaker on while you’re in the machine, so they have to wait for a technician to turn it off. So far, the brain is clear. What you have to fear is not what you can see, it’s what you can’t. When you’re looking at brain activity from the top down, it spiders outward and one layer might cover up another.

I am hoping it is just a side effect, because I have a different reality now that my mother is dead. I know how serious all of this is, and to pay more attention. At this point, it’s not time to go home. And yet, I understand and have empathy for myself because there’s not a lot I could do if I was there. Everyone right now is just sitting around waiting, and I can do that from here.

Although I do have those moments of “Jesus Christ, just come pick me up.” I’m not airing a grievance with my family, it’s just an expression I’ve picked up over the years when a situation is bad. It’s especially apt in this one because I don’t say it much when going in this direction. Most of the time it’s directed at Southern oppression and am phoning home to Maryland. It’s a coping mechanism, and it’s a good one.

It doesn’t take me long to get tired of living in the Bible belt, but I would return in a heartbeat if my dad needed me, and he knows that. It hits different when the universe knocks you on your ass by your losing one parent, because it makes you paranoid about the other one. It has nothing to do with how my dad is- all signs are good at this point. It’s a waiting game. It has everything to do with my frame of reference for the world being completely smashed to bits. When your parent dies, you are not the same person. Not even close. It rewires everything.

Knowing how much it changes you changes how you feel about other people’s deaths. You know it’s important to celebrate people’s lives and the time they had with you rather than desperately wishing for more. The universe has dice, and it is good at them.

Although I will say that in my grief over my mother, it was very much loss of the future we were building together because dying at 65 is nowhere near long enough to enjoy being retired. She retired in May and died in October. Her husband was 12 years older than her, and it never occurred to her that she would die first. It didn’t occur to him, really, either I don’t think. We were all shocked, therefore death cannot frighten me any more than it already has.

Your parent dying changes you more than it changes them, mostly because once you’ve been through that level of grief, you don’t want to go through it ever again. The main thing is acknowledging that my dad is just unwell right now, and we don’t know anything. I am not making things more serious than they are, just saying where I am emotionally.

When my dad gets sick, it’s natural to worry. It’s just not natural to think that him being unwell means he’s going to die immediately, because that’s my own echo chamber regarding my mother, not anything regarding his health. My mother had an embolism that wasn’t caught in time. She was almost DOA from the time that my stepdad called the ambulance. There were maybe 35 minutes between calls from Lindsay that my mom was being rushed to the hospital and the one where she was dead and I needed to come home. 35 minutes to process what happened with my grandfather’s death, which is that he lived so long he was ready to go. My mother died years ago, and he was fine until a few months ago. He died right before his 93rd birthday. There is no rhyme or reason with illness or death. You’ve just got to dance with them what brung you.

I’m glad I have a place to go when I’m internally freaking out and you know it’s not reality, because I’m not telling you the emotions of everyone in the room. It’s how everything is coming across to me, which is not objective truth. The only objective truth that I know is that before my mother died, I was not prepared for the reality of either one of my parents getting sick.

I am not spiraling out because my dad is sick. I’m rambling because I don’t have the blinders I did then. I do not have to worry that there are things left unsaid or anything like that, it’s just the natural thing a daughter does, just like he always does the things that dads do.

If he could speak properly, it would have been him who called me to tell me his complete history, physical, chief complaint, what is being done, what will be done, and three links describing the procedure and the protocol. We’re kinda different from other families, but we’ve all worked at the practice long enough we can hang.

It wasn’t child labor. We got paid. 😉

It’s also a completely different situation with my dad because he has one of the best doctors in the world watching over him, so she can translate from doctor to idiot quite fluently. That would be talking to people like me, if you were wondering…….

I pretend to know a lot more than I do, which is why if I am sent links, I will read them. They won’t be articles written by Joe from college, they’ll be official prescribing information or JAMA articles. If my stepmom doesn’t think he’ll get the proper care, she’ll move him until she does. His defibrillator is actually controlled by a company out of Boston.

Therefore, my worries are nothing more than my own. I just know you guys will worry with me, and I take all those good feelings in just as easily as I overexplain incessantly while waiting for news.

So far, I have to assume all is good, because if it was bad, someone would tell me to be worried and they’d be accurate about it.

But Jesus Christ, just come pick me up.