DAY 4
January 30, 2009
Friday
8:14 am
By now I was feeling like I
had aged 30 years in less than a week.
But I was buoyed by the fact that Ed was doing so much better, and
that my sister was coming into town this afternoon. All the while we are going through our little
family turmoil, the rest of the world full of commitments continued to roll
on—business transactions and bank accounts to follow; kids school and dance, my
own school, not to mention covering things around the house.
As for Ed, this was his second day of being “awake”—he
was still having a hard time with the fact that he had lost 3 days—it just
didn’t seem real to him. He was coping well, and getting stronger every
hour. The nurses tried to get him to walk this morning but he got very
dizzy. They would try again later in the day. His coordination was still
a little slow and his recollection still fuzzy—sometimes he remembered
our conversations, and sometimes he didn’t—although his business memory seemed
excellent.
The first
thing Ed said this morning was “have you heard from anyone?” – he was loving the attention, being so
excited to know so many people cared and were rooting for him. I told Ed that some of his old high school
buddies wanted to have a conference call with him when he gets home, and that
they were going to give him a hard time. He said he’d really like
that.
Same day
12:26 pm
Alex continued to handle the
work for his Dad—thank goodness he had been doing this since he was 12—by then,
he had already 10 years of experience, and by age 22 knew more about the work
than many others older than him. We were blessed to have a lot of emotional support
locally.
During one
of our visits today, the nurse asked us to stay only a moment because he had
just gone to sleep even though it was not quite lunch time. She said he was feeling very tired because he
was not sleeping well.
Same day
4:05 pm
Ed was thinking he would
be able to come home in a day, but in reality I knew Sunday (two days) would be
the earliest. He was walking with the help of a walker and an assistant,
but still pretty weak. He was especially happy to be eating again, however
his throat remained quite sore from the intubation and the cotton packing which kept
blood out of his windpipe.
It seemed
to be starting to sink in just how lucky he was to be alive, even though he
still had a difficult time with the fact that he “lost” time. One of the
kids told him to pretend he was abducted by aliens.
Our
afternoon was pretty busy because my sister was expected to arrive today. We rushed out to Gallatin Field and found that
her flight had been delayed an hour and a half, due to weather in Seattle (they
were fogged in), so we ran home again and did a little more cleaning and
straightening up, before heading to the airport again. It wasn’t long after we got there that her
plane arrived and we had a lot of hugs for each other. We helped her get her rental car, a Suburban
with all the bells and whistles you could imagine, and helped her figure out
how to get some things to work.
We had her
follow us to her hotel—and Alex called and said the Corsons were desperate to
see Ed at the hospital and wanted to visit him. He had been working in their home when his heart attack began, and they were naturally very concerned. I told him that after we got my sister situated,
we would all go to the hospital and they could meet us there.
We got
Karen into the Holiday Inn, and all went to the hospital and found that the
Corsons were already in the ICU with Ed.
Our visit with them was brief, and we didn’t stay long, —just enough to
have Karen say hello. I didn’t want to
tire him out too much. Alex and I went
back later that night to say Good-night.
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With the passing
of each new day, Ed wanted more and more to talk to, and spend time with his
family and friends. He wanted to talk to
them on the phone, hear their voices. It
suddenly seemed so important to hear the voices of family and friends. It was that same desire for familiarity and
reality. He was alive, and talking to everybody, proved that he was
alive. It was important to be alive.
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