A Year of Good Health

A year ago this weekend was a scary time for our family. At first I didn't even realize how serious it was and then it hit me in one of my million trips back and forth from home to the hospital in the truck and then my emotions really went haywire.

Tony woke me up very early Saturday morning and says he is having chest pain. I'm not a deep sleeper but that one morning I was sleeping good. I honestly didn't believe him. I had bought a container of tums the night before after picking our friend's daughter A to stay the weekend with us. We were going to get a date on Saturday since we had a sitter staying overnight with us. Tony had said he took tums all night and thought it was indigestion but it wasn't getting better and his left arm hurt. He has had pain with reflux and indigestion for a long time so I just thought it was a bad case of this again. I didn't want to leave A home alone to get the kids up and do the morning routine which is sometimes difficult with three who were one year old at the time plus Logan was home asleep too. Instead Tony drove himself to the hospital. I don't even think we discussed an ambulance but that would have been a good idea after knowing it was definitely a heart attack.

I fell back to sleep. I did put the phone beside me in the bed. I was concerned but really I thought it was another one of his bad cases of indigestion. He calls me around 6 am and says they think he did have a heart attack and the EKG wasn't normal. It still didn't click for me. All I could think of was that he's 32, we have four children, he's our sole provider, there can't be nothing wrong. He'll be home afterwhile.

I make phone calls letting family know and I call a friend to drive me to the hospital since Tony's truck was there and he definitely wasn't bringing it home. It wasn't until Sunday evening I think it was that they fully diagnosed him with a heart attack. One person thought he was told by someone else, blah, blah, blah - lots of yelling going on with the staff, but eventually while the cardiologist was in there I had to come out and ask b/c we were all so confused "Did he really have a heart attack?" and the answer was "Yes." Since it was a labor day weekend and nobody works those day in hospitals obviously, we had to wait until Tuesday for a heart catherization and not only that, he had to wait in line Tuesday and didn't have his heart cath until late in the afternoon.

I'll spare the details of the cath but he did have a moderate size heart attack and has a few stints in place and takes a ton of pills everyday. That weekend changed not just his life but ours forever and in some ways it changed it for the better.

We have a friend watching our kids for us tonight so we can have a kid-free dinner to celebrate one-year of good health and many more years to come. We never got that date last year we were going to have and I don't count the time together spent in the hospital. Hospital food and lack of privacy is definitely not how I want to spend a evening together.