What a weekend!!

So, we had a super busy weekend. It all started Friday. Yes, I know that technically Friday is a weekday, but it all lumped together.

Friday morning I was up getting Hazel ready for school and was just about to the time when I would have taken her, when my mom called and informed me that my dad was having a heart attack. I don't care how you say them, those are SHOCKING words to hear!

I then called my brother who was heading down to be with my mom at the hospital and got a ride with him. Shane ended up taking the day off so he could be with the kids.
As we were driving to the hospital, I got a phone call from the operating room charge nurse at the hospital where I had taken a resume just two weeks before, and she asked me if I could go to an interview Monday afternoon. WOW! It was a call I definitely wasn't expecting right then, that's for sure!

Once at the hospital, the staff (as in, doctors, nurses, etc...) were ruling out whether he really was having a heart attack or a disection (which is where one of the vessels in the heart starts to separate and pull away. Both can be fatal. The reason they wondered if it was a disection was because the pain my dad was experiencing was extreme, but different from a typical heart attack.

When we got there my brother was able to give my dad a priesthood blessing, and afterward, things really started rolling. First, in the ER, they did a transesophogeal echo. In English...they stuck a tube down his throat to his heart and took pictures to see if it really was a disection. Right before they did that we were taken to the waiting room...for obvious reasons.

Afterward, things happened really quickly. They determined it wasn't a disection, which meant that he really was having a heart attack, and they took him immediately up to the "cath lab." This is where they do angiograms (put a tiny video tube camera up a vessel so they can see where a blockage actually is. Then, if they think it is fixable with a stent, they put a stent in. A stent is a little mesh sleeve that they feed through the same vessel and then when it is in place they expand it so the blockage is removed. If they can't put a stent it, then they have to do a bypass.

On my dad, we were very glad that they were able to put a stent in. All of this took a couple of hours, but between trying to call people and let them know what was going on, and just taking care of things, it went by very quickly. Of course there was the additional...wow I have a job interview on Monday factor going along too. It didn't feel like the amount of time it was.

After they put the stent in, my dad was doing really well. They were going to keep him in the hospital until Monday, but he was coming along so great they released him on Sunday! So, I was very happy about that.

Along with all of this...Shane's sister was blessing her baby Sunday, and she lives four and a half hours away from us. So, by Saturday, everyone in Shane's family (which equals six families, plus Shane's parents) made the trek down.

All in all, definitely a busy weekend!