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| Angel_Bob (profile) wrote, on 9-8-2005 at 8:35pm | |
| Subject: The Nordyke-Greggs Syndrome |
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| This is the paper I wrote for my Inquiry and Expression class. All it had to be was a personal narrative. I wrote about my father going into the hospital last summer. I cried while I was writing some of it. I was kind of mean in my descriptions of some people but I was in a fowl mood. I'm sorry. It's six pages long so you don't have to actually read it. My mother's side of the family, the Nordykes, has a fairly common genetic disorder that can appear anytime between the age of 30 and 102. They have this "disease" called death. It took my aunt Patty in the form of breast cancer. Death hit my grandfather in lung cancer. Everyone insists it could have been delayed in my grandmother's case, that the doctors gave up on her because she was too old, but it took her too. Last year, death struck my uncle David when he had a heart attack. No one was really expecting it to happen. He was the superintendent of a few schools in Cincinnati, Ohio and had co-founded one. Apparently, he was short of breath and his chest felt tight a few days beforehand. His wife, Joan, and kids, Zac and Katie, just shrugged it off with little to no worry. He was in the gym of one of the schools when he collapsed. No one even knew how he died until the coroner's report came in. It was hard for everyone in our family to accept that death could be quick and surprising instead of prolonged and expected like we had seen in everyone else. But that's not what I mean to talk about. I'd like to tell you about four days in August of last year. It all started on the 10th. Brigitte, Ben, Nick, and I were at the mall that day. I didn't, and still don’t, know Brigitte that well. She and Ben were dating back then, that's the only reason I ever saw her or went anywhere with her. Brigitte was a beautiful brown-haired bombshell who had to be one of the sweetest people in the world. She was odd, though. Like those lollypops with insects inside, she was sweet but smoked pot got drunk every weekend. It was strange that she was dating Ben. He's kind of a mean guy but for some reason, they were attached at the hip. Ben's one of those people who act like they know everything, might truly only know half of what they're talking about, but can argue both sides of any argument and win. I don't know how he does it but it's terribly intimidating. He and Nick had been best friends for most of high school. Nick has the most beautiful green, spider web eyes and dark brown hair. He's the nicest person in the world and has an analogy for everything. I might be a little biased, we were dating then and still are. Nick was the one who actually invited me along that day. He asked if I wanted to come with them to the mall because, as a girl, I'm supposed to jump at any chance to shop. It was a pretty normal, if not mediocre, day. Brigitte dragged us to the mall to look for a video game she wanted. We all sort of tagged along with her while she shopped, none of us really wanting to be there. Nick wanted to spend time with me once we got home so he and I went back to his house afterwards. We were watching a movie and just generally "hanging out" when my mother called. I'm a lot like my mother. She is stubborn and not afraid to speak her mind when she wants something or thinks something is wrong. She'll look in people's drawers and through papers on their desks if they aren't in the room. Until she got anti-depression medication, she was always uptight and never wanted to do anything. She was 47 years old last year, and when I answered the phone, she sounded a lot more worried than normal. She told me that she was taking my father to the hospital. My father is the lawn and garden buyer for Meijer and travels a lot. He had been out of town on business and when his plane landed, he called my mother saying that he felt light-headed, couldn't breathe and his chest felt tight. My mother, as much as she tries to deny it, worries about as much as I do. The fact that my father had the same symptoms as my uncle did, days before he passed away, scared her. I was so afraid when she told me. I remember that she said something about the doctor’s office being closed and she just wanted to play it safe. She asked if I could go home and take care of my younger siblings. It was hard to articulate any form of agreement but somehow I told her I would. Truthfully, all I heard were his symptoms: "tight chest, hard to breathe, light-headed". They played over and over in my head after I hung up the phone. The words wouldn’t go away, even as I sat there crying and trying to formulate a thousand reasonable and healthy theories. Nick lived in Cedar Springs then and I lived in Rockford. Our houses were about a half an hour away from each other and his car wasn’t working very well that day. Luckily, his whole family was in town because his grandfather had surgery to remove one of his lungs. They were hoping the surgery would delay the effects of his lung cancer. His aunt was nice enough to give me a ride home and I sat in silence the whole ride home. Once I was home, I sat around being extremely nervous and more worried than I had ever been before. I asked my brother and sister if they knew anything I wasn't told but they were just as worried and lost as I was. We walked around ghostlike and performed our regular activities, playing video games and eating mostly, without thinking or caring. We just waited for the phone to ring and called our friends to make sure they knew what was going on. My mother called later and said that my father had blood clots in his lungs, at least the doctors thought, and he was going to be on blood thinners for five days. That was upsetting because we had planned on going to a ceremony that weekend at the school my uncle had co-founded. They were making a "thinking garden" in memory of him. We were going to drive down to Ohio, spend time with relatives and go to the ceremony. It would have been nice because we always joke that we only see our relatives when someone dies. With my father in the hospital, we weren't going to see them at all. I think we didn't care about missing the ceremony as much as we cared about my father getting better. My mother insisted throughout the rest of the day, and evening, that he was okay. She made sure to tell us multiple times that she wasn't worried and that there was nothing to worry about. I know that she meant it as a comfort for me and my brother and sister but it only made us fret even more. She told us not to worry so much that we began to wonder if she was covering up something that we actually should be worried about. We all stayed up as late as possible. Our excuse was to try and catch our mother coming home but we just didn't want to leave each other’s company. I knew my mom was worried when she came home late that night and walked into my room. I was half awake because of a bad dream when she came over to my bed. She reached down to me, held me like I was a baby and we hugged for a long time. She then gave me a kiss and told me to go back to sleep. I knew it wasn't for my comfort as much as it was for hers. The next day, we went to visit my father in the hospital. It was probably the most frightening experience in my life. The only times I had been at a hospital were when my mother had my brother and my sister, when my sister got sick and was dehydrated, and when my mother had bad back pain. I'd never been to a hospital for anything serious. I hated the sterile environment, unfeeling doctors and strange smells. To see my father lying in bed, hooked up to a thousand beeping machines (the function of which I didn't know), was a lot to handle. He looked so small. He told us that he'd be in the hospital until Sunday because of the blood thinners. The doctors gave him some kind of medicine that would dissolve the clots. They also gave him two strict diets to follow: one for his blood thinners, another one to keep in shape. He was officially diagnosed with sleep apnea, was told that the apnea might have caused the blood clots and informed that being overweight causes some forms of sleep apnea. On August 12, my boyfriend came along so he could drive my father's car home. It was a very nice thing for him to do and it helped calm me down greatly. Since no one knew what exactly had caused the blood clots, my father was moved to different floors depending on whatever theory the doctors wanted to concentrate on. While we were in my father's hospital room, he mentioned that his IV was hurting and when they took it out, because of the blood thinners, he was bleeding profusely. It was shocking. Everyone views his or her parents as invincible, god-like beings but at that moment in time my father was human, he was mortal. The tension in the air told everyone that we were all thinking the same thought: he could die. And now, he was just a man in a hospital. He was just a 51-year-old man in a numbered bed in a numbered room. My siblings and I left the hospital solemn and scared. On Friday the 13th, my mother told us that since they couldn't find out where the blood clots came from, they were trying to prove that they weren't there in the first place. I hate that cold scientific rationality. If someone can’t prove where something came from, they disprove that it ever existed. Blood clots or no blood clots, the next day my father came home. He was still on his new diet and much stronger. The next step was to have a sleep study done to assess the state of his sleep apnea. When the results came back, in turned out that he was waking up over 100 times an hour, he got a special kind of breathing machine that forced his throat open so he was always breathing correctly. He's okay now. He's been using his breathing machine for almost a year now. He hasn’t had any complications and he only gets short of breath when he’s climbing the stairs and feels "old". It's frightening. My father escaped what could have been a death knell. For the first time in my life, I look at my parents and see the wrinkles on their hands and the gray in their hair. They aren't going to live forever. And I’m scared of the time when they won't be there for me anymore. I'm sure that after all of this, the only proper thing to do is to be thankful that my mother’s "disease" didn't strike my father, but the only thing I'm worried about is who it's going to strike next. I don't want it to be either of my parents. I love you all. |
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jessa_lynne | 09-09-05 11:20am i read the whole thing.
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hwnchick | 09-09-05 12:33pm i dont even know if my parents are still together or divorced or alive for that matter. they live on the mainland and i live here in hawaii and their phone's gone out so i have no way of contacting them because they never write back if i send them a letter. its a very scary feeling, so i know what you went through. its a very good paper though. <3 |