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Monday, December 18, 2006
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IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE
It's two o'clock in the morning in my father's house. My mother is asleep and my sister has gone home to explain to my niece and nephew that their grandpa has gone to see God. Grandpa's birthday was 12 days ago. He was 63 years old. I tried everything I knew how to save thier grandpa and I failed. I have no idea how I'm going to face those kids tomorrow.
At the only time it ever mattered, I failed. I couldn't save my father. Because of that, my nephew and neiece have no grandpa and my mother has no husband. My father died yesterday because I couldn't save him.
My mother, sister and I have been expecting this for twenty-three years now. But that doesn't make it any easier. Since November of 1983, he suffered 8 heart attacks. The ninth struck at two o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday December 17th, 2006 and it killed him within an hour.
I happened to be here, and I can tell you that he didn't go down easy. My mother and I were on separate floors of the house and were there within seconds of his falling in the kitchen. I was on the phone with 911 and administering CPR as my mother collected his various medicines and medical history information for the paramedics. I fought like hell to keep him alive. But unlike the last time, I lost. 55 minutes after collapsing, a doctor a Sunnybrook Medical Centre who I'll never meet told the paramedics on the scene to abandon their efforts to save my father's life. I was in the living room with my mother as they stood over my dad and turned off the EKG machine.
They were incredibly fast getting here. I think it took them all of six minutes. It seemed a lot longer. If you've never given CPR, you don't know how exhausting it is. It takes a lot out of you physically. Just to do it, I tried to ignore the fact that it was the man who raised me was on the floor turning purple as I worked on him. I blocked out the fact that my mother was calling my sister - who was doing her Christmas shopping for her kids - to tell her that it was time. My only focus was to keep him alive until the professionals got there.
The fire department was here first, and they took over the CPR. I was ready to collapse by the time they did. That's very hard work and my arms were spent. It was the longest six minutes of my life. But I had a job to do. I was pushing oxygen into my father's lungs and keeping his heart going. I hope that none of you ever have to do what I did yesterday, but it did keep me focused. As long as I was doing CPR, I was able to detach myself from the fact that my father was dying beneath me. As weird as it sounds, keeping him alive negated the idea that he was going to die.
When the fire department arrived; I was removed from the kitchen to be with my mother. There was one number that kept going through my head as we watched the firefighters work on my father - fourteen. If it becomes necessary to give someone CPR, there's only a fourteen percent chance that they'll survive. Yes, they actually do keep statstics. They taught me that when I learned CPR. I also knew that the brain could only survive for about four minutes without oxygen. My father was only taking a breath about every forty seconds when I was working on him. Hold your breath and count to forty. Thank God he was already unconscious when he hit the floor. I'm not sure I could handle watching him if he knew he was slowly suffocating.
I think I knew intellectually that this was it, but I was't exactly operating intellectually at the time. It was only when the firefighters and, later, EMS got here that the number fourteen started ricocheting through my head. I almost wished that they didn't come so I could keep doing CPR, just so I wouldn't think of the number fourteen. If they didn't, I'd still be doing CPR now, twelve hours later.
When the paramedics got here, they shocked him over and over and over again between chest compressions. With each jolt, his left arm raised bent upward and I had a little hope. But I kept thinking "fourteen." I couldn't say it out loud because I was holding my mother. And I was praying for something I intellectually knew was impossible to happen.
She knew far better than I did what was happening. She knew that the man she had married thirty-nine years ago, the man she had two children and two grandchildren with, was leaving for the last time. It was amazing; she was actually more concerned about me when it was happening. The love of her life, the father of her children - Grandpa - was dying in front of her and she was worried about me. Christ, I'll never forget that.
Every once in a while, one of the paramedics would come into the living room and talk to my mother and I. They were particularly nice to me, saying that if I hadn't done what I did, they wouldn't have had much to work with. I'm not sure that that's true, and it sure doesn't make me feel any better.
Then it was over. The man who had been with me for thirty-six years was dead. The first time I actually said the words out loud was in leaving a voicemail for Dr. Reverend. I typed an instsant message to Zombie and sent e-mails to Joan and Judy, but the first time I actually said that my father was dead out loud was to a machine. My sister dealt with my cousins, because I couldn't. I didn't even know how to tell my friends, let alone my surviving family. I'm still not sure I can talk to anyone about this.
The hardest part was after. Unless there's a suspicion of foul play or there's no next of kin, EMS doesn't remove the body from the scene. We had to wait for the coroner before we could do much of anything. At one point, there were three gurneys in the living room, but my dad was never on one of them. He was just lying on the kitchen floor with a breathing tube down his throat. For three hours.
Thankfully, the coroner got here before my sister did, so I could get him to remove that fucking tube. I'm still not sure why it bothered me so much, but I didn't want my little sister to see that goddamn tube and it was important to me that it got taken out before she got here. The coroner took it out, and there was my dad - lying on the kitchen floor and covered to the neck in an orange city of Toronto EMS blanket - dead. Once the tube came out, everything hit me.
I understand it, but I still don't believe it.
We started the day talking about Newt fucking Gingrich on Meet The Press and eight hours later, I watched as the coroner filled out his death certificate.
A couple of months ago, I thought I hurt as bad as I ever could. I was wrong.
I watched my father die on the kitchen floor yesterday. And nothing will ever be as hard as begging the coroner to take a breathing tube out of my father and seeing funeral home attendants wheel him out of his house for the last time as my mother, sister and I watched.
I still can't believe this. I'm in my father's house, my mother is finally sleeping, and I don't think I've ever felt this alone before.
PermalinkLabels: Life With skippy
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