Family Crisis

I have not been blogging much lately because we have been knee deep in a family crisis. 

Eleven days ago, Grandpa Roy had a massive heart attack while driving his truck.  Luckily, a good samaritan noticed he was having trouble and called 911 as soon as he crashed his truck.  This allowed a fast response by emergency professionals who did CPR and transported him to the closest hospital.  Doctors did an emergency angioplasty and blew open a closed artery in his heart.

He was in very, very critical condition.  Because it was not known how long he had been without oxygen, they decided to do cooling therapy where they cooled his body temperature to about 92 degrees for 24 hours.  Then they warm his body back up for 24 hours.  This therapy is very successful in preserving as much brain function as possible in these types of situations.

After the warming phase, he was still on a ventilator for another 4 days while they stabilized him  After a week they removed the breathing tube and he was transferred to his home hospital where he remains in ICU.

We are seeing improvement everyday - to the point where he stood up for the first time today!  Doctors are calling him a miracle patient because no one expected him to be doing so well.

He still has a long way to go but as a friend pointed out: "progress is progress"!

Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.

I am sure I will have reflections on this experience as time passes by but for now, I am using all my energy just to move forward.  At some point I do want to be able to reflect because there are a lot of lessons learned thru this experience -

Lessons in devotion
Lessons in love
Lessons in karma
Lessons in friendships
Lessons in being a good person
Lessons in strength
Lessons in relationships

I do have to say that we are incredibly blessed to have a wonderful family and tremendous friends.  We feel the love and support every minute of the day.