My Dad

Thursday morning I woke up @ 5, since that is the only time I have if I want to exercise.  I had just finished my work out and was about to get into the shower, since I was nasty and sweaty.  It was about 5:30 now, I was in the bathroom when my cell phone rang, the only person that calls me that early is my mother, so I wasn’t in any big hurry, then my home phone rang.  I thought, she must really want to talk to me.  Then my cell phone rang again, so I hurried out of the bathroom to answer it.  It was my dad, that is really odd.  He told me he was feeling dizzy and sick, and he wanted me and Brenden to come over and check him out.  I knew what he was thinking, that since Brenden and I are both EMT’s that we should  be able to come over and tell him what was wrong with him.  We went over and he was sitting on the couch.  We were asking him a bunch of questions.  We knew something had to be wrong, because my dad isn’t going to call and ask for help unless he’s really bad off or scared.  He had woken up at 4 that morning, and when he got up to go to the bathroom he about fell over, was dizzy and felt nauseated.  He waited till 5:30 to call.  I gave him some orange juice, because I didn’t know if he just had low blood sugar.  Later when I had him sit up to take a blood pressure he threw that up.  Even when he was just sitting there not moving, the room around him was moving.  First blood pressure was something like 150/89.  We had him stand up to take another one, I had to hold on to him really good so he wouldn’t fall down.  It dropped down to something like 128/82.  NOT GOOD!  All signs of stroke.  We came to a conclusion that we needed Ty over there, and the only way to do that is to call 911.  Brenden made the call, we ended up taking him down in the ambulance, I went with, even though I wasn’t on call.  Called my mom to let her know.  We gave him an IV and some drugs to help settle his stomach.  He was felling a little better.  His big concern was keeping the lights and sirens OFF!  He didn’t want anyone to know the ambulance was at his house.  We did the stroke test on him on the way down, it was negative.  We had no clue what was wrong.  After and MRI, two cat scans and many other tests done on Thursday and Friday, they found that the arteries in his neck are 89-90% plugged!  If they wouldn’t have found that he would have had a MAJOR stroke within the next 2-3 years.  Today he went in for his first surgery, they will first go on one side of his neck and clear it out then in about six weeks they’ll do the other side.  I just got a phone call and he just got out of surgery, everything went well and he’s doing good, he should be able to come home tomorrow.  I’m just glad he called and asked for help and that we were able to take him down to the hospital and find all this stuff out before it was too late!  I love that grumpy old guy too much to have something too serious happen to him.  Glad he’s okay!