Loving Your Family
I have read so many articles and posts that begin with “every parent’s nightmare” and I often felt empathy and sympathy for them, but I lived my life in the happy bubble that nothing like that would ever happen to me. It made me that much more unprepared the day that I joined the nightmare club. I had just gotten home from work and was watching TV while discussing various ideas for dinner with my oldest child when the doorbell rang. I was faced with two female police officers whose faces told me they had bad news to tell me. The words “son” combined with “collapse” and being transported to the nearest trauma center via ambulance made my blood run cold. I called to my daughter to come with me and went out to my car, without shoes, intent upon getting to the hospital as quickly as possible. She followed after me (having picked up a pair of shoes on her way) and we were off. My compact car easily made the 115 mph I felt prudent to get down the freeway as fast as possible. We arrived at the ER and were greeted by more grave faces and quickly placed in the separate waiting area. What followed was the longest 24 hours I have ever lived through. My perfectly healthy 18-year-old son, who had graduated high school just 3 days earlier, had suffered a cardiac arrest event. We were in the hospital with him for 36 hours before he had been stabilized enough to have his breathing tube removed. Phrases like “brain damage” “oxygen deprivation” and “neurological assessment” were being thrown around everywhere. I had slept 30 minutes in the last day and a half and my brain was sluggish when I was first asked if I had power of attorney to make decisions on my son's behalf. My son, who arrived a 10lb 10z smiling and contented baby just 10 days before my 30th birthday, was 18 and therefore an adult.
We were fortunate that the hospital accepted me as his mother who shared the same address, and therefore allowed me to be involved in his care. I was told in no uncertain terms however, that if decisions were to be made, we would need to speak with the hospital’s legal counsel. From seven months after this event, I am constantly aware of how lucky my family is. We were lucky that the supervisor my son worked with knew CPR, we were lucky that the EMTs responded within 2 minutes and were able to shock my son’s heart back into a regular rhythm, we were lucky that our failure to plan for this “worst case scenario” hadn’t become a huge problem. My son is in the 3% of people who survive a full cardiac arrest episode – he has a high-tech defibrillator implanted in his chest so that he is safe if it should ever happen again. After a whole battery of tests and scans, none of the 26 doctors he saw were able to give us an answer as to why it had happened. We were lucky in every possible way. We were lucky that my ignorance about having an advance directive for my barely 18-year-old son didn’t make our situation a million times worse.
We are not attorneys but after my experience and what I was told by the hospital, my advice to everyone who still lives in the happy bubble where bad things don’t happen to their children is to have an advance directive done the day your child turns 18. Before they leave for college, before they graduate, before you make or buy them that big fancy birthday cake. Get it done and have it ready and hope and pray that you never need it. There are many sites that provide the basic template free of charge. The easiest one I’ve found is www.caringinfo.org. It takes just a few minutes and the peace of mind it provides is priceless.
- Jul 24, 2018
Favorite Refreshing Beverage
I have never liked soda or sweet drinks, and am a huge fan of unsweetened iced tea, but my new favorite refreshing drink is Pamplemousse (Grapefruit) La Croix. Not only is it a healthy beverage choice that is 100% natural, calorie free, sugar free, sodium free, and has no artificial sweeteners, but also La Croix is an American made sparkling water. It is delicious and can be found in most stores that sell sparkling waters for around $3.69 for an 8 pack. Enjoy!
- Jul 19, 2018
My beautiful friend
It’s been a little over two years since I lost one of my friends – and I don’t mean lost like “we lost touch” or I “lost her address”, I lost her to suicide. At first I couldn’t believe it, I kept thinking it had to have been a mistake. She was one of the most vibrant people I have ever known – the kind of person you can hear laughing from a mile away, that makes you want to join in and find out what’s so funny.
My friend had dealt with a lot of stress, her nightmare divorce still trumps any story I’ve ever heard (A spouse with substance abuse, being accused of attempted murder, spending jail time, losing kids to CPS just to cover the highlights). She had struggled with sobriety and come through with her head held high, her sole focus was getting her kids back in her life. So how could this wonderful, vivacious and tenacious woman give up?
In the days that followed I found myself reaching out to other friends of hers, fondly remembering her and wondering if anyone else had any ideas as to what had happened. Needless to say, the common theme among our conversations was guilt – why hadn’t we checked in more often? When was the last time we had spent time with her? Ironically it renewed and cemented a lot of our friendships as we had all drifted a bit apart and been caught up in our own lives.
Her oldest child was months away from high school graduation and the younger two were just beginning their high school careers. I have tried and tried and just can’t wrap my mind around her choice. It brought into stark reality for me how hard it is for someone who struggles with mental illness (or addiction) to cope on a day-to-day basis. Because we all knew she had found sobriety, we assumed she was “fine”. None of us stopped to think about how much despair there must have been in her life, having only supervised visitation with her children. We didn’t take time out from our own lives, spending time with our children, to realize how she might feel isolated and alone.
I am not saying that I feel we are responsible, my friend was an adult and made her own choice in the end, I just know that for me – I’ll never really lose the guilt of wishing I had done more and then perhaps she would have made a different choice. In the much darker world that my friend left behind I have adopted a few new rules. I check in with my friends much more often, and never hesitate to tell them how important they are to me. (I have gotten several witty comments from my friends about this change, but nonetheless I persevere.) If I have a friend who I know is dealing with any kind of stress I try to make sure they know I am there for them, day or night. The flip side to this is that I now sometimes reach out to my close friends when I’m dealing with things as well. I know that none of this will bring back my beautiful friend, but in her memory I’m trying to make sure nobody else in my friend group will feel as alone as she did.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please get help – the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is always available at 1-800-273-TALK.
Needing help doesn’t diminish us; sometimes it’s a much-needed part of surviving life.
