It's 1:15 PM June 7th as I begin to type & quite frankly I'm not really sure what exactly to say. The last several days have been something of a blur...but blogs were made for rambling posts, so by golly that's what I guess I'll do!
It all started the morning of June 1st when I came upstairs to consider my breakfast options & noticed that my usually easy going father seemed to be rather under the weather. As he trudged into the bathroom (again) Mom explained that he seemed to have either food poisoning or a flu as he had been trowing up for the last few hours. Flu's are nasty buggers - but hardly uncommon - so we all went about our day pretty much like always...save for Dad wearing a grove in the floor from his chair to the bathroom & complaining of a sharp, constant pain throughout his abdomen. When no improvement was seen by that evening, we decided that if he was still this sick in the morning we would take Dad to the local emergency clinic. That plan was soon replaced when Dad declared he couldn't go through another night like he was & decided to go to the clinic right then.
Turned out to be quite literally a life saving decision on his part.
See, as it turned out Dad didn't have food poisoning or a bad case of the flu, he actually had a large portion of his small intestines dead from lack of blood flow & was soon on his way to Swedish hospital in Seattle for emergency surgery. He was mere moments away from having his bowel perforated...which, incidentally is exactly what killed the wife of my Tuesday night carving teacher a couple of years ago.
In short, as of 4 AM June 2nd, Dad's survival was looking like a long shot.
Enter the power of my post title.
I don't know if it was the prayers & thoughts of the people Mom, sis & I reached out to or Dad's seriously amazing ability to tolerate pain (or a bit of both?) but he was off the ventilator a day after surgery, up an walking faster than anyone ever hoped & is actually on his way home from the hospital today, 6 days after this whole thing started.
Just so this really sinks in, the average recovery time for folks undergoing the same surgery is 10-14 days.
I think the thing that best sums up this whole ordeal is when the surgeon who preformed the operation (and gave Mom & I the less-than-optimistic prognosis) came to see Dad just after the ventilator was out.
I don't know if I have ever seen someone with a more pleasantly surprised look on their face before in my life.
"Sometimes it's nice to put a check in the win column for the good guys" he said.
No kidding, dude.
No kidding.
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