The cheers and jeers edition.



Time is tight today so...

YEA to waking up this morning and smelling donuts as their scent wafted in my window from the Dunkin' Donuts about a block from my house.

NAY to getting a ticket for rolling through a stop sign as I hurried to the aforementioned Dunkin' Donuts to itch the scratch laid in my belly upon waking.

YEA to heading down to Bloomington/Normal, Illinois later today and Columbus, Ohio tomorrow (where I'll meet up with some of my DoneWaiting co-writers) with Woolworthy(see poster above.)

NAY to maybe having to cancel the trip, from my end, due to my dad being in the Intensive Care Unit.

And now we've come to the crux of this post.

Yes, my dad is in the I.C.U. because his breathing became very erratic yesterday morning. I went to see him last night and while he feebly waved to me when I was finally allowed to enter his room that was the extent of our discourse…or his awareness that I was even there.

I just talked to his doctor – or the attending or whatever they call physicians that aren't the primary doctor – and was told that my dad made it through the night fine, he was stable and he was alert. He was under painkillers when I saw him last night so I think that had a lot to do with his, um, being out of it. I'm going to wait until later today to make my final decision about going out of town but if he seems fine then I'm going.

I struggled with this since it seems kind of selfish of me to do but this is really heavy stuff I'm not used to processing, so my gut instinct, when black humor runs dry, is to run. Obviously if I thought my running would deny me a last goodbye or anything like that I would fight my flight response and make my peace with my dad...but I don’t think that's the case just quite yet. He's not done.

Seeing him last night was weird though. He had a mask strapped to his face that was basically doing all of his breathing for him. I guess they took it off for a minute to give him some pills before I got there and all of his vitals plummeted so I think it's safe to ay that, at this point, the oxygen mask is essential. They keep telling me with one breath that he'll be fine and then follow up with questions about just how far they should go should things turn south. That freaks me out.

My dad isn't that old, so why does it look like he's dying in front of me?

I'm not ready for this.