Dean and I talked on Sunday at lunch. He brought it up, which was a good thing. I’m assured that there aren’t worse problems at work now. Things are good, now. He explained some of the things that he’s been going through, and so did I. I feel much better with us now.
Today was a scary day. I got up, helped out my brother with the mower, nothing too big. We were trying to measure the size of a belt. Anyway, I came in to get ready to go facilitate group, and I had a voice mail. Dean was crying into the phone. His dad was scheduled for an angiogram last week, they couldn’t do it, so they rescheduled for open heart surgery this week. They found a clot at about 5:00 p.m., and told the family that they had to do a quadrouple bypass. So Dean calls to tell me this just bawling into the phone. I headed there immediately.
Shortly after I got there, they said that the family could go see him. A few minutes later, everyone comes back just bawling. His dad was having trouble breathing. Dean was standing with the rest of the family, Kim Pritchard (who had been there all day), Carol, and Kim Wesack and I were sitting in the chairs in the little room that we had. He just starts crying, holding onto himself for support. It was the worst feeling, ever. There he was, and I couldn’t do a damned thing to comfort him. I had to watch him just be hurt like that, and I couldn’t even walk over to give him a hug, because Dean’s sister, Cheryl doesn’t know about us, or even him. Kim Wesack went over and gave him a hug, et. cetera.
They went back and forth to the room a few times, and the machine kept going off. About two hours later, a doctor came in and told us that they didn’t know what was wrong. They were asking to put a balloon into his aorta so that he could get enough oxygen, but that they didn’t know what was going on with Dean’s dad at all. They went ahead and did the procedure, and came back in just a little under an hour (they had begun preparing before getting consent to speed things up). The family went in to see him, and said that he was doing much better. As it sounds, things are going to be okay, after all. He’s going to stay in the intensive care unit tonight, and we’re hoping that things look better tomorrow. Scary stuff.
Today is my parents wedding anniversary, and, actually, the one year anniversary of when Joe jumped out of the moving car and had to go to the hospital. Today is also, literally, the longest day of the year, since it is the summer solstice. How strange is all that?