You asked for it...

Greetings,

Okay, okay. It's been far too long. I know. I guess I'll use this post to explain where I've been and why I haven't posted much in the last three months.

On September 23rd, two things happened which have dominated my time ever since. On that day, I started what I would later dub "The Quarter From Hell" at Eastern Washington University. Also on that day, while I was at school, my dad had a massive brain aneurysm rupture. I was in the middle of class when my sister called. I called her back after I listened to her voicemail, not sure how seriously I should take things (the women in my family have a tendency to make even the most trivial event seem like a universe-ending calamity). When she explained to me that my dad was vomiting, and couldn't tell her what the date was, or who the President of the U.S. was, I knew that it was serious.

Eastern Washington University is located in Cheney, WA, which is about 20 miles from my house, and the campus is a parking nightmare. Because of this, I made the decision to ride the bus to school every day. This suddenly seemed to be a bad idea when I got the call about my dad. I had to wait about 30 minutes before the next bus left Cheney. It took about a little over an hour for me to get to the hospital from the time I found out. That entire time, I was preparing myself for the loss of my father. I didn't have much information, but I knew that confusion and vomiting were signs of a stroke and that strokes, even when not fatal, were life changing events.

I am closer to my dad than I am to any other member of my family. This is a bit ironic, since he's also the only member of my family that I'm not related to by blood. He and I haven't always been close, but since I moved away from home, he and I have become very good friends. During the bus ride into Spokane, I was called several times by my other family members who were all trying to convey to me that as his oldest child, I would be the one to make his medical decisions.

When something like this happens, everything around you becomes annoying background noise. All around me were college kids excited about their first day at school. I wanted to strangle all of them. I wanted to shout out "DON'T YOU FUCKERS KNOW MY DAD MAY BE DYING!!! SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT THIS TRIVIAL SHIT!!" When I finally got to the hospital, I sat in the waiting room while the ER docs tried to figure out what was wrong with my dad. My nephew, who is 6 years old and had no concept of the magnitude of the situation, was trying to ask me all kinds of 6 year old questions. I wanted to throw him out of a window.

The neurologist who originally treated my dad in the ER explained to us that my dad had an aneurysm in his brain which had ruptured and was bleeding inside of his skull. He told us that these types of events were very serious and that usually, when they were caught as early as this, they still only had about a 50% chance of having a "positive outcome." It's a fucking brain aneurysm! I thought, What exactly is a "positive outcome?!" I had never even heard of anyone surviving a brain aneurysm, let alone regaining anything resembling a normal life, so I continued to mentally prepare myself for the worst.

The neurologist showed us Dad's CT images and it looked like there was a hell of a lot of blood in his head. He told us that they needed to do an angiogram in order to find out where the aneurysm was and then they would be able to determine how best to treat it. We went into the room and saw my dad. He was fading in and out of consciousness, and each time he woke up he wondered where he was and kept complaining of a terrible headache. There is only so much of that one can take, so I went into the waiting room again.

I tried to get my mind off of things by e-mailing my professors and letting them know that I would not be in class the next day and requesting my homework assignments. Then a nurse came in and told us that they were ready to move Dad over to the radiology unit to do the angiogram. During this time, my relatives seemed to come out of the woodwork. I saw family members that I hadn't seen in years show up to show their support for my dad.

Those of us closest to him went into a separate room when the angiogram was done and we listened as the radiologist explained the situation and recommended the next treatment procedure. Their plan was to enter my dad's circulatory system via the femoral artery with a small tube. Once the tube was in place, they would run a series of platinum coils up into the aneurysm in order to reinforce the vein walls and prevent any further rupturing. He also explained to us that if the procedure was successful, Dad would be in the ICU for at least two weeks while they watched for a condition called vasospasm - where the excess blood in my dad's skull irritates the smaller blood vessels and causes a stroke. I talked to everyone and then decided to give him consent to go ahead with the procedure.

They finished the coil procedure quicker than they had originally planned and came in and told us that everything went as well as it could have gone. They still had no idea to what extent my dad's brain was damaged, but he was alive and he was stabilized.

Again we migrated. This time to the ICU waiting area. They had dad set up in his room and they had him intubated. They told us originally that he was sedated, but when we went in to see him, he was anything but. He was fading in and out of consciousness again, and he seemed to have absolutely no short-term memory. Every two minutes or so, he would wake up and panic because he didn't know where he was and he had a huge breathing tube shoved down his throat. His eyes were pure hysteria. They implored us to take the tube out of his mouth. He tried over and over again to do this on his own, but his arms and legs were in restraints. All we could do was pat his forehead and reassure him that he was Ok and that everything was going to be alright. Of course we were all scared to death, because the last thing that someone who has just survived a rupturing brain aneurysm needs is an anxiety attack - nothing like rapidly elevating blood pressure to stroke ones brain out. We finally convinced the doctors to extubate him and to sedate him for the night. Once he was sedated, my wife and I went home. It was going to be a long haul.

I spent the next couple of days in and out of the hospital, and on Saturday, September 26th, decided to allow myself a little time to unwind. My wife and I headed over to some friends' house to just get our minds off of everything. We started to drink a bit and somewhere around 8:00pm, I got a text message from my mom saying that my grandpa (her dad) had been taken to the hospital with a urinary tract infection. I didn't think too much of it, because my grandpa had been ill for the last year or two and had had several similar infections. We continued to unwind at our friends' house when, at around 1:00am, my mom called me sobbing. "You need to get to the hospital" she said, "The nurse called and said Grandpa's not going to last the night." I couldn't believe it. How much more could I take? My grandpa was like another dad to me. While my dad and I weren't all that close when I was growing up, my grandpa filled the role. He was always there for me with advice and was always there to help me out of the jams that I would get myself into. He paid for my guitar lessons and encouraged me more than anyone else to take up music. To say that we were close would be a gross understatement.

Luckily, my wife hadn't been drinking much, so she drove us up to the hospital and when the elevator doors opened and I saw all of my family in the waiting room, I knew we were too late. He had died before any of us were able to get there.

I walked into the room and saw his body. It was emaciated a bit from the last couple of years of his illness. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open. He looked peaceful, but he didn't look like my grandpa. I knew somehow that his spirit was still in the room. I went over to his body and I kissed his forehead. I sobbed and sobbed. I apologized for not coming to see him in the last year. I kept saying over and over how much I loved him and how much I missed him. Finally, I said goodbye and I went out into the waiting room to try and comfort the rest of my family the best that I could. My mom was beside herself. She had lost her daddy and she felt like she was robbed of the chance to say goodbye. I tried my best to comfort her.

The next three weeks were a blur of hospitals, homework, and funeral homes. I don't remember a whole lot of specifics, except for Grandpa's funeral. I sang "Amazing Grace" on the guitar that he had passed down to me. Dad was recovering slowly but surely. He had his ups and downs, but it was looking more and more like he was going to come away from this thing relatively unscathed. Today, he's been home from the hospital for a few weeks and still gets tired pretty easily. He gets dizzy and has headaches every once in a while, but for the most part there appears to be no long-term brain damage. There is a new vitality about him, despite his physical weaknesses. He realizes that he has been given a new lease on life and seems to be thankful for that in the way that only those who have looked death in the face can truly be.

One other thing about that time that I think I should write about is my own spirituality. Before all of this happened, I was quite content to call myself an Atheist. I didn't believe in any particular god, so I was Ok with the idea of there not being a god at all. I was estranged from the church, and I knew I would never go back to my previous version of Christianity, and I was quite comfortable with things. This situation changed all of that.

On Friday, the 25th of September, I went back to school and as I was walking across campus, I saw the reader board of an Episcopal church that was right across the street from the campus. Normally, I hate church reader boards. Most of them say the stupidest things I ever end up reading, and they usually get me all fired up and ready to spit nails. This one was different. It simply said this: "We take the Bible seriously. Not literally." As strange as it may seem, this was exactly what I needed at that time. Up to that point, my main hang up with Christianity, and with the idea of a god in general, had been an intellectual one. I couldn't justify logically the things that I had been brought up to believe spiritually. I'd come to believe that the Bible was a collection of fairy tales and fables and that people who took it literally were absolute imbeciles. I especially hated the idea of pre-determinism and of "God's Plan" and all of that other crap that people like to throw at you when you're in the midst of a crisis. But, during this time, I couldn't deny that I needed some spiritual support. After all, all the intellectualism in the world doesn't bring you any hope when you think your daddy's going to die.

This sign helped me to put aside all of my intellectual misgivings. It, along with a very liberating conversation with my favorite aunt (who is one of my spiritual heroes), helped me reconnect with the God that I've known all of my life. These events did not convert me back to Christianity, they did not lead me into any dogmatic creed, they simply gave me back someone to pray to. Today, I will not define God. I will not put a name on him/her. I will not assign a gender. I will not say that there is any one way to get to him/her. I will not try to explain his/her nature. I will not make any absolute statements about God whatsoever except these: God is good. God is love. God is in my heart. That's it. That is all I am willing to say about God. I don't believe in the literal truth of the Bible, but the book of Ecclesiastes sure helps me put things in perspective from time to time, as do the words attributed to Jesus. I don't believe in a Hell, or the necessity of salvation, but I sure do love praying to my God. I believe that my God is bigger and more magnificent than anything my brain could ever comprehend, and so I choose not to try to comprehend it anymore. I just pray when I feel like it, and that is all I need. So I am thankful for these few weeks of incredible anxiety and heartache because they helped open my heart back up to a relationship with a God that I had almost forgotten about.

Now then, all throughout this time, and ever since it, I have had to deal with what I proclaimed earlier to be "The Quarter From Hell." I make this proclamation because I have discovered during the course of this quarter that I am really not cut out to be a science major. I know, I know. A lot of you were saying that from the get go, but I believe that we are only as big as our challenges, and because I faced this challenge and gave it everything I had, I am bigger for it. I WORKED MY ASS OFF THIS QUARTER... and it looks like I am not even going to pull off C's in either my math or chemistry classes. On the other hand, I was able to write five pages of what I am sure will be an A paper for my Indian Studies class in less than half the time that it took me to do one day's math homework. So, I made the decision to go back to my original plan of majoring in English with a history minor. I will be a high school English and history teacher, and I will love it. Who knows, I may get the gumption to go back and get a general science endorsement once I finish my BAE, but right now I am just going to focus on doing what I do well.

Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry that I haven't taken enough time lately to keep this blog updated, but hopefully, now that most of my energy is going to be focused on literature and composition, this quarter will be a different story and The Sermon will spew forth like the everlasting fountain of minutia it was meant to be. Until next time...

I am the Reverend Humpy and I have approved this message.