When the phone rings at 4am it’s never good news.
No one is calling to tell you that you have the day off.
Or that you just won a million dollars.
The phone ringing in the dead of the night can only mean one thing.
Something very bad has happened.
On January 20th our phone rang at 4am.
And yes, it has taken me over 100 days before I could actually write about it.
My father in law had a cold in early January. My in-laws had spent Christmas with us and we all figured he caught a cold on a plane on the way home.
On January 19th he was told he had an ear infection.
On January 20th he woke up in middle of the night disoriented.
My mother in law called from the hospital. He was in septic shock.
The next few weeks were a blur. My husband flew back east and I tried to manage going to school full time, taking care of two 2 year olds, and keeping my husband focused on the positive.
He saw his Dad dying every day. The full ten days out east, it was like each day he slowly slipped closer to death.
A coma is a hard thing to see. Feeding tubes, breathing tubes, IVS. So many machines to keep someone on this side of death.
And the constantly changing diagnosis. Meningitis, encephalitis, maybe both, it all depended on which doctor looked at the MRI that day.
I know I’m annoyingly positive. It is simply my way, but it was a fine line to dance. Going over the google results with my husband on a daily basis.
Yes, I see that the stats really are not in his favour.
Yes, he is in a coma.
But, I remember the doctor I knew that was in a coma for months, and came out of it to re-write exams and practice again.
Comas can heal.
I know it’s annoying to live with someone who always wants to remind you to have hope. But I drove it home every day.
If you don’t have hope, you have nothing.
Don’t give up on him, he’s not giving up, in fact he keeps trying to pull out tubes, he is fighting. And fighting is hard to see. Suffering is hard to see.
My husband has been out east several times since January to visit his parents. My father in law is still recovering in a hospital. Most recently he took our little lady out east.
She brought all of this happiness to the hospital:
I’ve learned so much about what matters to me in the last three months, my family, as always is number one.
