My stepdad was admitted to the hospital on Saturday for what presented as an infection. Yes, he had an infection, but he also had something much worse. On Sunday, he started having breathing trouble, and further diagnosis began. At about noon, my aunt called to say, “Please come up. It’s bad. Really bad.” I could tell that she was scared, so I was packed and on the road for Rockford by 12:45. Cell service is spotty at best through the rural areas of Missouri, and updates from the hospital were intermittent.
I thought about a lot of different things as I drove, but I flashed back to when I met “Ralphie” for the first time. He was a giant mountain of a man, and I really hated him. You see, I was seven and I was too young to understand that marriages fail and people move on. All I could see was that my mom was marrying someone else and my life was being uprooted. But, he was patient. He was kind. He understood. And, he waited me out. Then, came the day that he was just Dad. I know now that I won the “step dad lottery.” He did not have to be my Dad, but he wanted to be. The one thought I kept coming back to was, “Please don’t let him die until I get there.”
When I finally had service again, I got the call that he had a pulmonary embolism, and they wanted to do surgery that evening. He was in surgery before I arrived, so I went to my uncle and aunt’s house to await word. It was a long evening, and we finally gave up and went to bed. Just as I had fallen asleep, my phone rang. I saw a strange number and answered. It was the doctor calling to tell me that surgery went, “very, very, very well”, and that they had removed clots in both his lung and his leg. She even told me that my dad was cracking jokes and keeping them laughing as he laid there for five hours awake for the entire procedure. I felt so much relief, but the fear was still there.
I went to the hospital the next day, and he was tired, but he was alive, answering questions, and talking. He still has an infection that they are working on, but he has been improving every day. They hope to release him to an in-patient rehab clinic tomorrow to kill the rest of the infection and get his strength back.
As I mentioned, it has been a week, and I am exhausted, but, my stepdad is still with us. All I can say is that I know the teams at Javon Bea Hospital “just did their jobs,” but those jobs saved his life. I will forever be grateful to them for giving me more time with him.
I love you, Ralphie. Thanks for waiting me out. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t know just how lucky I am.
