One phone call

One phone call in the middle of story hour turned my world upside down. I was reading Snog the Frog to a rapt group of preschoolers  when the boss interrupted to tell me that I had a emergency call from my sister. My Dad had collapsed at home and was being taken to the hospital at Decatur. When I saw him in the emergency room  I didn't think he was going to make it. His heart had already flat-lined once and it did twice more before he was stabilized in the ICU at Lutheran. Since then we've learned that he didn't have a heart attack, but instead a cat scan found tumors in his brain. There was swelling in the left side of  his brain which the neurologist suggests cut off the blood supply to the Vega nerve and essentially stopped sending the necessary nerve impulse to tell his heart to beat. They've given him steroids to reduce the swelling and already his condition has improved remarkably. The timing of this whole thing just hours before the appointment for  the closing on their house sale was either disastrous or fortuitous depending on your outlook. J made the point that it would have been so much worse if  it had happened even a day earlier. My Dad, being the Superman he is, had just finished cleaning up and packing the remainder of the unsold items from the auction when he collapsed. It would have been so much worse for Mom if she'd had to manage all of that on top of his hospitalization. He's far from being out of the woods, the swelling in his brain caused aphasia which is slowly improving.  The really unusual part of this is that my Dad had two siblings who died with brain tumors. The neurologist said he's never heard of three siblings having brain tumors, and hastily reassured us that there's no scientific support for brain tumors being passed genetically.  My next thought was that there was something toxic in their environment and I remembered the asbestos sided house they were raised in, but Dad said his older siblings never lived in that house. Regardless of the cause, the tumors are there and will soon be biopsied. The results won't be available for 2-3 weeks, but Dad will be released from the hospital in three more days. The neurosurgeon has already given us the hard word that even if it is malignant it's inoperable because of its location in the brain.  Mom and Dad knew his hospital stay would be brief since he's a Medicare patient and it's just as well since Dad has some pretty strong opinions about how much treatment he wants to receive. The memory of his sister, Leah's struggle with chemo and radiation is still quite fresh in his mind. This experience has taught me some things about my family, about our resilience and our pride (which apparently has been passed genetically). Even though we are all very different individuals there's a common core of strength and faith that enables our family to survive so much hardship.