It was an interesting weekend...

...but not the good kind of interesting.

So, my dad had a heart attack last week. That was really not the way I wanted to wake up on Friday. My phone rang and the caller ID said "Mom Cell Phone," which I immediately knew meant something wasn't right. My mom is possibly the worst cell phone carrier of all time. Usually she only has it on when she and my dad are out of town and she's worried one of us might need to reach her...so the fact that she was actually calling me from it meant something out of the ordinary had happened. I answered and she told me that my dad had suffered from a heart attack and he was going to be fine, but she wanted to let me know. I grabbed a pen and paper to jot down which room he was in at the hospital and told her I'd be there in a bit.

I have a good relationship with both of my parents, but I've definitely always been a "daddy's girl." My dad and I share a similar sense of humor and I feel there are things about me that he understands better than my mom does. He was certainly much less exasperated with me as a teenager (sorry Mom!).

So you can understand how for me at least, there is something very unsettling about seeing your dad laid up in the hospital with tubes in his nose and wires connecting him to all sorts of machines neither of you understands which beep for no apparent reason (ok yeah, of course there's a reason...I'm just of the opinion that hospital machines shouldn't beep unless something is wrong...mainly cuz it freaks me out a little). How am I supposed to react to that? Here was the guy who's been a protector and a provider for the majority of my life...last time I saw him he was perfectly fine and now he's (temporarily) incapacitated. I still don't really know, it was weird. I just did my best to keep it together (after all, he was going to be fine, no reason to fall apart) and told him I was glad he didn't die. Cuz the more I heard about what happened, the more I realized he very well could have.

Here's the thing about my dad: he is as stubborn as hell (yes, that's where I get it). He started having chest pains on Tuesday...they got pretty severe on Thursday, but he drove to the airport to pick up my Grandma anyway. Then on Friday he woke up and said the pain was so intense he felt like his entire body was on fire. Only then did he tell my mom he thought they should go to the hospital (he hadn't told her anything up until that point). And then, before they left for the ER he was sure to make the bed, shower and then clean the shower. This is my dad, folks. Classic. It's funny because that is sooooooo him, but terrifying because most other people wouldn't have waited that long to get checked out and had he waited any longer, he'd be dead.

*Shudder*

ANYWAY, I didn't have any major epiphanies about how fragile life is or anything like that (although this was definitely a reminder). I did ponder death a little, and how strangely we deal with it, particularly in this culture...but that's another topic for another post. And I was reminded how much I don't like hospitals (they smell funny). But honestly, I don't have anything profound to say. I'm just really, really happy my dad didn't die. Here's to hoping he sticks around for a LONG time. :-)