Superbowl Sunday

February 7, 2021

Images are taken from our original photos and edited in Canva.

For the nation, Superbowl Sunday is the most celebrated holiday of the year. My dad wasn’t a big sports fan, but he was looking forward to watching the game. About 3:15 in the afternoon my mother called me, “I think your father is having a stroke.”

I ran to my truck and raced down to their house in less than four minutes. For those of you who have never witnessed an event like a heart attack or stroke, it’s horrifying. I felt helpless.

I tried to get an aspirin in his mouth first thing. Because we live in a very remote rural setting my first thought was to carry dad to the truck and drive him to the hospital myself. However, he was completely rigid and apparently convulsing to some degree. I couldn’t get him into the truck by myself and my mother was not strong enough to assist me. I immediately called my uncle, who lives a mile away, to see if he could come for help. He told me to call 911 so I did.

If you’ve never lived in remote area in the rural Midwest, you probably don’t know that sometimes getting an ambulance to a farm like my parent’s, at the end of a long, winding gravel road, can sometimes take much longer than you hope. In this case it was nearly a half hour and combined with delays in calling for help on our end, it was 45 minutes after he had his stroke, until they could get him out of there.

What threw me was that my dad was very responsive. His speech was affected and he couldn’t move but he could talk to me and answer questions. He discouraged me from calling for help. He knew what was happening to him.

When the first responders arrived, five or six showed up. The nurse in charge immediately began diagnostic steps to determine what had happened. “This looks like a stroke” Immediately four men picked dad up and carefully but swiftly carried him down the half flight of stairs in my parent’s split-entry.

He was in an ambulance and headed back down the lane in minutes. Law enforcement escorted the ambulance the full 35 minutes to the hospital and paramedics did what they could to stabilize dad en route.

Mom started packing an overnight bag for herself and dad, she appeared calm, she went about getting important documents, insurance information, toiletries and dad’s shoes.

I was freaking out. I had an all-over nervous body buzz. I was pacing, waiting for mom to finish packing. I was trying to help her with her task, but to be honest, I don’t know how much help I was. I just wanted to get on the road and get to the hospital.

Seeing my dad like that landed hard. That was my dad, large and in charge and suddenly he was reduced to a quivering pat of butter. My dad, the man I’d worked with every day of my adult life. The man of our family.

As my mom hurried to get things in her small suitcase, she asked me questions, “Will I need his social security card?” “I have his insurance card but I can’t find his driver’s license.” That’s because it was in my dad’s wallet and my mom just couldn’t think straight because her husband of nearly 60 years, just had a stroke.

The devastating reality of his mortality and the pressure it put on me to step up and immediately be a leader in the family was overwhelming.

Life was about to change dramatically. I was about to completely change my focus and attention. Long-time associations were about to end, starting with Cherokee Community Theater.