life got twist-turned upside down

Note: 2 am post after a draining week means run-on/repetitive sentences, grammar awfulness and typos.  Since this is obviously my blog, I don't really give a crap.


Silly me, last October, thinking that despite sadness it would be nice not spending weekends in hospitals/rehab centers for many more years.  My mistake, life.

Now I get to learn alllllll about strokes and symptoms of damage, and enlarged hearts, and so many fun things that can take someone's life and make it unrecognizable in less than an hour.  I also get to jump into the fun game of finding balance between built up years of hurt/frustration/anger/blame, more contemporary years of neutral disregard, and then the most recent renegade feelings of fright/sympathy/caring, and then applying them to this situation.  I don't really think anyone deserves getting such a demotion from functional human being to weak broken dependent... and yet I've observed a 20 year old college student at MHC go through a stroke, two octogenarians go through it (one surviving two strokes, one not so lucky),  and now my 57 year old dad, who was a menacing 6 foot plus strong guy with a brash loud voice with a twinge of Bahston accent (brought out more in large male-heavy groups).  Now he is limply hanging out in a hospital bed making baby-sentences and looking bleary eyed.  What the fuck. I'm a firm believer in OT/PT working some magic, but let's be honest, no one ever gets back to 100% from this low point.  At the same time, this is obviously not a death sentence.  It's just seeming to be a quality of life sentence, and that freaks me out as someone who makes an effort to take advantage of the many ridiculous adventurous and enjoyable things I can do in a day (week/month/year).

What is very weird is watching my mom bravely commandeer the situation, whatever personal feelings she has set aside, to try to figure out the future before it's too late to hold on to the everyday life she has created and enjoys.   My dad makes a lot of money but his union job, wildly enough, doesn't give him any sick or vacation days- meaning it's a good thing he has a very specialized skill set without a lot of competition, otherwise he could easily be let go/laid off.  However, while his job is fairly safe in the present, he doesn't get paid while he recovers, and he needs to hit a certain number of hours per year to keep his (my mom's/jenn's) health insurance. Now my mom needs to figure out how to take the lifestyle of $xxxk, and make it work on just her income, until my dad can magically go back to work.  No wonder you see all those ridiculous commercials with old people griping about how they broke a hip, lost their house, and now are thousands of dollars in debt and have no way to finance their funeral expenses (this is a bit of an infomercial merge, sure).  The strange part of this is that financially, with the threat of job loss/health insurance loss/crazy medical bills, this major life event doesn't affect me.  I am an independent adult with my own mortgage and job and bills, and yet the empathy I am feeling translates to me wanting to shoulder some of this scary impending crisis, to be a part of whatever awful medical/financial snafu lands upon my parents.  Who wishes for this?!

Through my late teen/young adult years I found (and still find) myself making mental note of everything my parents have done for me; from shouldering the majority of my 200k college education, to helping renovate my house weekend after weekend, bailing me out of sticky situations...the list goes on. I've constantly recognized how lucky/fortunate I am, and how some day, way down the road, I would have the opportunity to pay these favors back.  Who would have guessed that time would come so soon...