Caregiving: Why me? The beginning

Why me? A job that you did not apply for but is given the challenge to step up to the plate and give back to your parent that did so much for you. The grief and triumphs of being a caregiver for a parent. 

Let's start at the beginning of my journey of being a caregiver for my father. It was Thanksgiving morning; traditional parade is on the TV and FIFA is playing on split screen on the living room tv. My father was always the one waking up at 6 am to watch the iconic thanksgiving parade and would wait for a repeat for us to wake up and watch it with him. But this particular morning was different, my dad was still a asleep and it was late in the morning almost 11am i heard his bathroom door open and started to walk towards my father's room to see him sitting in his chair dazed and just staring at me. I walk in yelling, "do you have your hearing aids on?" as I got closer, I notice the drool coming from his mouth and I thought this is a stoke?! I called 911 and quickly answer all their questions (I have some comments on this in a later post) my wonderful first responders where here in minutes and whisked him off to the hospital.

I arrive at the hospital and get all the details that my dad did suffer a stroke and they are doing an ultrasound and x-rays to see if there is a blood clot somewhere that may have caused the stoke. As my dad was rolled back into his ER room my sister and I ate a cafeteria Thanksgiving dinner at my dad's bed side. We had 10 minutes of good old dad conversation about being at the hospital on thanksgiving. Then as we were laughing and tell him that this is one for the memories, his blood clot traveled from his neck to his left side of his brain. In that moment, our lives would change forever.

He suffered from an embolic stroke. This is caused in his MCA (middle cerebral artery) stoke that was caused by a blood clot that came from his carotid artery on his right side of his neck and the clot was lodged and blocking blood flow to the rest of the brain. Every second counts as blood flow are critical for the brain to function.  I had to make a 10 second discission to give my dad a shot called a "TNK" shot this is a Tenecteplase injection that dissolved blood clots in certain blood vessels in the body.  I based my decision to give him the shot when I asked the neurologist if i was his daughter what would you hope she would choose, he quickly answered to give him the shot and with that I gave the consent and within one minute they gave him the shot. Since it was thanksgiving the hospital, we were at did not have an on-call specialist to perform the thrombectomy. It was now closer to 6PM and they took him to another hospital which is also a training hospital where they had a specialist on site. By 8pm they had removed the brain clot and now we wait for his recovery in ICU. 

Within a few hours he was wake and speaking in Spanish (which is his first language) and the Doctors explained to me that the blood clot caused damaged to the Broca's area of the brain which is called a non-fluent aphasia because speech is effortful and involves starts and stops. Speech and writing will be affected, this answers why he only answered in Spanish. And since the clot was on his left side of the brain this effected all right-side extremities. He could not leave or use his right side of his body this was his dominate side as he was right-handed.

What do you do now?

Stay tuned for the next post.

~H