Family matters

Daddy's Little Girl

We recently had a terrible scare in my family when my dad came down with a mysterious illness that landed him in the emergency room at the Williamsport Hospital. What he thought was the flu (he and his girlfriend spent Tuesday to Friday with horrible body aches, chills, fevers and coughs), turned into a serious battle with pneumonia.

That Friday night, my dad called from the ER to tell me that his girlfriend was being sent home with antibiotics, but he would be admitted to the hospital. Chest X-rays showed pretty solid pneumonia in his right lung.

On Saturday, he seemed in good spirits and even OK health, considering what his already damaged lungs were going through (dad has been a pretty heavy smoker for quite some time). He had his usual smoker's cough, but nothing out of the ordinary, besides his obviously tiring week. That night I left him, giggling about his description of the camp-style bath he'd taken earlier in the day.

I called him Sunday morning before church to see what time he'd be leaving. I called just in time. He was wearing an oxygen mask and was extremely winded and while he was leaving his room, he wouldn't be going to a good place. He said he'd call me back. Instead, his girlfriend called after she'd arrived to his empty room with a coffee and the newspaper, eager to see my father. My dad was being rushed to the Intensive Care Unit. His oxygen level was steadily dropping and his chest X-ray was a mirror image of Hurricane Katrina.

My brother and I headed to the hospital and arrived in the nick of time. We were directed to his room at the end of a long hallway of critically ill patients, where he was surrounded by nurses, respiratory specialists and doctors. Even though he couldn't speak through the oxygen mask, his eyes told me what he wouldn't admit. He was scared. And in his eyes, I heard him apologize for lying to me. He told me things were going to be OK, but now, he just didn't know. The doctors explained that they would need to perform a bronchoscopy to examine his lungs and remove some of the fluids that were causing the problem. They would perform countless tests on him - blood tests, cultures, a urinalysis - to know exactly what it was they were fighting. Was it Legionnaires disease? MRSA? Strep?

Following the test, they would insert a ventilator that would help my father breathe in a way his lungs would not allow. He would be placed in a coma and we would begin the longest week of our lives.

My father and I are extremely close. We talk every day, sometimes several times, and we share things with each other. There's a trust about my dad that, over my lifetime, has become a sturdy bond that is untouchable. Although the circle would remain unbroken, my heart was in a million pieces. Nature had intervened and this one-sided conversation would not do.

I talked to my dad over the oddly soothing sound of the breathing machine, a steady 35 pushes of clean air a minute, and often with each mechanical breath, I whispered a prayer for good health and happy dreams for my father. I would doze off with him, holding his swollen hand, and imagine my small fingers as a little girl wrapping around them in the same way, many years ago. I reminded him that he had many more small fingers to hold between my brother and I's four children and his girlfriend's grandbabies. He sometimes responded with a raised brow and he even opened his eyes at times, but they were filled with fear. It was heartwrenching to see his blue eyes each time he came to, and then to see them drift off again.

Monday, the doctors said my dad had taken two steps forward, but Tuesday had regressed again. There was too much fluid to even see his lungs on the X-ray. They still were no further along in their diagnosis than Day 1, but at this point had ruled out the Legionnaires disease. Without knowing exactly how to treat my father's illness, they pumped him full of fluids and antibiotics to cover a broad spectrum of possibilities. Wednesday was the day, though, that my father decided enough was enough. They saw marked improvement on his X-rays after eliminating some of the fluids in his body and the ventilator was able to be slowly weaned down. By that night, he was breathing on his own about 60 percent of the time.

By the next morning, the doctors decided the machine had reached its maximum potential. While that seemed scary to me, as if they were losing hope, they reassured me that it was a good thing. My father would be able to hold his own and no longer was reliant on the machine to breathe for him. They sent us out of the room for what was the scariest half-an-hour of my life. I worried that he would "crash" like you see in the movies and I imagined doctors everywhere yelling "code blue" and "I need a paddle," "blood pressure's dropping," "we're losing him." While everyone was excited around me, the scared little girl that emerged that week was shaking uncontrollably.

They called us back to see him and what I saw was the sweetest image that will forever be burned into my memories ... I saw my dad, there on the bed where he'd slept for almost five days, reaching out to us, hugging us and telling us he loved us. Later in the day, when he'd gained some strength back enough to talk, he told us the doctors took him on some field trips. The big one? Salladasburg. He doesn't remember what he saw, but he knows he was there. He also visited the Iowa State Fair, where there were John Deere tractors galore. What a trip, he said.

I went on a trip, too, that week. I revisited a lot of fond memories of tube socks as Christmas stockings, and rubber inner tubes turned into sleds, I saw bony elbows bopping to the tune of Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" and I remembered my father and I dancing on my wedding day to the Grateful Dead's "I Will Take You Home," a solid promise that home isn't just four walls stocked with appliances - it's extraordinary people who are one of a kind. It's my father ... and my husband - the father of my two beautiful children, it's making memories and plans for the future, it's knowing that you have been loved, are loved and will be loved for a lifetime.

Dad is on the road to recovery now and, although he's got a long road ahead of him, little blessings are showing themselves. He's now a non-smoker, a prayer I've recited many nights, and the biggest blessing? The future. Praise be to that.

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