I made Tom laugh last night

I made Tom laugh last night. I told him I hadn't any good updates for my blog so I was going to pull an old event out that brings a smile to our faces. You can have adventures sometimes that were stressful but in hind sight see the humor. What brought this particular story to light was being back in the hospital at that medical appointment.

The first time my dad got sick, he had recently found out about the colon tumor. He was to see a liver colon specialist to schedule his surgery. The day before the appointment, he had full blockage. In excruciating pain, he drove himself the five miles to the hospital, since he lived by himself, and did not want to bother with an ambulance. It was an emergency surgery rather than a planned operation. He did not have time or the ability to flush his system out prior to the partial colon removal, which made it a particularly messy surgery.

Dad had just enough time to call a best friend in the area and tell him to contact the family, namely me. I had known I was emergency contact for my dad and the time had come. It was one of those moments when the angels intervened. I was volunteering at the boys school when Terri, my Dad's friend, tried to call. Tom happened to be home from work, getting some lunch which is rare indeed. Tom got the call. He had to track me down, figure out where I was. Here is the first humor of the event. He had to call the district office to find out the name of the elementary school the boys attended. I was tracked down at their school and told to phone home. I stopped by the boys' classes to let the boys know I would be gone when they got home and that their Granddad needed me for a while.

Then I began to freak. Dad lives in Tucson and I needed to pack and catch the next plane. Time was critical. By the time I got home from the school, Tom had gotten on line and looked up flights. There was a 3:00 pm getting in at 8:00pm in Tucson. It gave us plenty of time to pack and get to the airport. Tom booked a one way ticket for me and drove me to the airport.

Daylight savings had just passed. The clock in Tom's car was an hour ahead. As we reach the airport, I think that we are cutting it close to make check in for that plane. I kiss Tom and rush through the airport doors. I get my ticket at the counter and go to the security barrier. I hear on the overhead speakers my gate being called for last call. I panic. I look panicked. Security takes one look at my one way ticket and my panicked appearance and pulls me aside for the full search. They put me in the puffer room that smells for drugs and bomb materials. They search my bags. Mean while I hear again the last call for my gate number. Finally I clear security and run for the gate.

The flight attendant sees the special red stamp on my boarding pass courtesy of security, showing I had been given the full treatment. She doesn't look any closer. She says I haven't missed the flight. I am the last passenger and they were waiting for me. As soon as I board the plane the doors shut and they back away from the terminal. I sit down in an open seat, since I see some one is in mine. We taxi up the runway and the pilot comes on the overhead mike "Welcome to your flight to VEGAS". I had gotten on the wrong flight.

It was the right gate but the wrong time. I had been early after all. Tom's car clock had thrown me off. Well, now it was out of my hands. I was just grateful I wasn't headed to Japan or China.
My thought was that all flights go to Vegas and away from Vegas. I was headed in the right direction, east. I let the flight attendant know I was on the wrong flight. She said they would straighten it out when they landed. I just wonder what happened to the person they were holding the plane for.

When I land in Vegas, the clerk says the next flight is in two hours. I will miss my connection in Phoenix. He says there is a flight in five minutes if I run. I run. Again they close the doors right behind me, but this time I confirm Phoenix? Yes, Phoenix. I land in Phoenix two hours ahead of my original scheduled landing. I caught an earlier commute to Tucson and my Dad's friend is waiting for me.

Terri is just as distressed as I over my Dad's illness. They have known each other since grade school. They weren't friends back then but they did know each other. They had become friends when they found out they both retired to Tucson. Knowing each other brought back that familiar feeling of their old home town with all the memories associated. Terri was a little older than my Dad and suffered from lung issues. He drove a 1964 convertible mustang in orange. He also couldn't see well in the dark. He knew his way around by being familiar with the area. he was not familiar with my Dad's neighborhood after dark.

We got lost. we were going to go to Dad's house so I could get spare keys and drop my bag off. Dad lived in a lovely community built around a plan of circles with spokes. The houses were on the top of hills with washes between, giving every home a nature view. Washes are dry river beds that flood with heavy rains. They have paths meandering through them. All the homes look down on these washes. In the dark, we circle the neighborhood trying to find my Dad's street. There are no street lights.

Tucson is near enough to the observation telescopes at Kitt Peak that they don't use street light to prevent light pollution at night. So I am driving around with a little old man who can't see well and can't find the right street. We pull up in front of the street signs so the car lights reflect and we can get out of the car and read them. Finally I call Tom and ask him to google the street we are on and talk us through to my Dad's house. Modern technology is wonderful. He does just that. We were only a block off. I thank Terri for getting me to my Dad's house safely and using a spare key enter quietly. I then look up the number for a taxi service to take me to the hospital. My Dad's car is still parked in the parking lot there from the day before.

The taxi comes and delivers me without incident to the hospital. Dad comes out of 6 hours of surgery and I am able to sit with him in ICU. He doesn't remember it later, which is just as well because he was in excruciating pain for a long time. Once we get moved to a room he becomes pretty demanding. He likes me to spend the night on the recliner in his hospital room. In the morning I go back to his house to shower , change and get a bite to eat and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Those nights in the hospital are worth it when a few days later, my Dad is awake at 3:00am, he is not sure he can carry on. he feels on the verge of giving up. His bowels have not started working on their own yet. He has a feeding tube down his nose that is driving him crazy. I tell him that we should get up and walk the halls one more time and just see if something doesn't start working. We are the only ones awake on the ward other than the nurses. We walk that hall down and back. That is about all the distance my dad can take. Within the hour he has to get up and use the bathroom. He poops and we whoop for joy. The feeding tube gets pulled the next day. My Dad cries after it is out. We get to go back to his home a couple days later.

They send him home with a hole in his stomach that is to be cleaned daily. Some one has to stick a six inch cutip in his gut with peroxide to prevent infection. The home health nurse does not come every day. This is an area I know no one will do as good a job as the surgeon in my Dad's mind. I say no, I am not going to clean out the gut hole every day. I will assist. I had hoped they would up the home health visits as a result, but instead they show my Dad how to stick the cutip in and clean the hole himself. I assist by setting up the surgical tray and handing him the implements.

Due to the surgery being really messy, feces came out Dad's abdomen. We were warned there would be a high chance of infection. It happened. Of course when the puss appeared it was 10:00 pm on Saturday night. We drive to the ER. We wait all night. The surgeon is on vacation and no one wants to touch my Dad in case they do something they shouldn't. In the morning the surgeon calls and says to clean it out well. We waited all night for that news. It made us both grouchy. He did end up being readmitted for the week though as a result. So they could clean it out properly every day. If they had just given us a nurse once a day for a week rather than once every 3 days,some one who knew what they were doing, we would not have gotten the infection.

In the hospital they really cleaned the hole out well. It is amazing how they reamed that cutip around into every crevice of the opening in Dad's gut. We realized we had been too delicate in our approach. I am glad I had not done it for Dad.

He is feeling good, even though he is being hospitalized for the infection in his stomach. He is grouchy because of the confinement. He is very demanding and rings his bell often and more when I am not in the room. He ends up alienating one of the head nurses so she has him moved from her section to a new room in another wing. I start bringing candy for the nurses, per my mom's suggestion, to help bribe them and smooth over a difficult patient.

When he finally gets discharged, that last week of recovery, before I come home to my own children, are bliss. I get to relax and read books. We spend afternoons at Barns and Nobel having milk steamers, coffee, and reading stacks of new books. Dad has a membership card and uses it freely to purchase books as gifts for everyone at home. The sun shines and Dad finds his new routine. That trip bought my Dad two more precious years for us all to see him and prepare.

I had been gone over a month when I finally come home. I can see I am needed. There is a full month's worth of laundry waiting for me. The cats have started peeing on the piles, because their litter box was buried. I asked the boys what they were doing for underwear. Riley tells me he wore the old dirty pairs, the same ones, over and over. Trevor tells me he just stopped wearing underwear at all. Tom tells me I should have gotten a free ticket from the airline for allowing me to get on the wrong flight, and what a waste sending me to Vegas and not him.