Emancipation of A Drama Queen

Surreal isn’t the right word. I’m not sure what word is fitting in this situation but it’s not surreal. I’m no wordsmith, of course, so coming up with the appropriate adjective is proving difficult.

Monday morning I received a call from my sister that I was not expecting. She informed me that my step-dad was in the hospital after collapsing at home and is being air lifted to a special neurological hosptial in Phoenix. At that point I can’t quite remember what else she said because I was crying my eyes out and sort of in disbelief.

To be honest, I was quite surprised at my own reaction. I love my step-dad. He has been in our family for over 10 years now. Even though I live far away and rarely get to talk to him, when I do see him, it’s like we saw each other every day. He has been great to my mother which is very important. He also has six kids, all around my sisters age and a tad younger. They adopted my mother as their own and have meshed with our family really well. I guess all of our dysfunctions pooled together to create one big happy and dysfunctional family. It’s pretty damn great. But, despite all of that, I didn’t expect to feel as heartbroken as I felt when my sister told me about him.

After I hung up with her I called my husband crying and told him I needed to go home. Again.

The boys and I hopped on a plane today and we are now back in Arizona for an undetermined amount of time. We went to the hosptial from the airport and I looked in on my step-dad feeling very apprehensive of what I was about to see. It’s hard to look at a strong, macho, active man in such a state of incapacitation with an astronomical number of tubes and catheters coming out of him. Ironically, however, my sister and I grew up seeing my father like that often. He was a sick man and had numerous major operations and varying health issues. Even though we were used to this kind of thing, to me, it was like a brand new experience. My father’s issues were all heart related. This time it was neurological and much more complicated.

My heart is breaking because I have to watch my mother go through this all over again. For over 15 years she was by my father’s side during his operations and health crisis’. Now, she is going through this all over again. No one wants to see her have to bury another husband.

My mother is the pillar of strength in these situations and is also a veteran. She will never let you see that she is upset or scared. And, as luck would have it, she just graduated from nursing school last Friday and is now a full-fledged RN. Funny how life works sometimes.

Even though my step-dad couldn’t hear me and had no idea I was in his room today, I told him that out of all of his wives (he was married twice before my mother came along - one just got out of jail after 8 years for robbing a bank in Mesa and the other is a complete whack job times 100) he picked the right wife to have an aneurism with. My mother laughed, and I know he would have too.

I will give details of the aneurysm and the procedure he went through later on and what his prognosis is. Right now I’m exhausted from a long day of travel and battleing two toddlers on an airplane alone. We only had one major meltdown on the plane, but it was enough for me to ask the flight attendant for a parachute. Ok, well, I wanted to ask her for one but when she came to ask if there was anything I needed (flight attendant code for “shut your fucking child up”) I just muttered “no thank you.”

Then we will cover the topic of automatic flushing toilets and running out of toilet paper. They both suck.

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Please, say a prayer, do a tribal healing dance, rub the belly of a Buddah, or just light a candle for my family. Whatever it is that you might do in a situation like this I would appreciate it.