The Moment It All Changed...

I have been reading and talked to some people on how to start a blog. Almost everything I have read or anyone has said to me is “write what you know” or “write about what you love”. Well I am a 33 year old mom and wife. I work full time at a car dealership. I love my kids and I love my husband and they all drive me insane almost daily. I have crazy anxiety over the smallest things. I sometimes wonder how I got here. How I got to this specific point in my life where I grew up some how and started adulting.

There was a pivotal moment in my life when everything changed. Some would say it was when I met my now husband but that isn’t quite right. It started months before that. I still remember that night. I was attempting to sleep because like every other day I had to work early in the morning. It was about 1am and I hear my dad's little Honda civic hatch blaring music outside my window. I get up annoyed of course because he isn’t thinking about anyone else having to get up early or that maybe someone was sleeping and he is so rudely waking me up… So full of anger and not fully awake I bust through the front door and down to his car and tell him to turn it the fuck down because I have to be up by 6 and he can lay in bed all day tomorrow. He turns down the music and turns to me and says very calmly “I went to the doctor today and I don’t have a cold, I have lung Cancer.” Everything fell away. All I can see I that car my dad and the little bit of porch that the light is hitting. Everything else is gone. All I can say to him is “We got this, but if you don’t turn this music down so I can sleep the cancer wont kill you but I will.” I hugged him and went back to bed but didn’t sleep. That’s when everything changed.

When I say everything changed I don’t mean everything in my head, the way I thought, or behaved. Although that did change. I mean EVERYTHING. I went to work the next day and told them I am no longer available to drive out of town daily. I need to stay within a half hour to 45 minutes away from home. I talked to another store manager and began the process of him letting me transfer to his store so I would be even closer because at that point nothing else mattered. Nothing was as important to me as to be with my dad. I started dating someone new as well through this. Looking back I shouldn’t have tried because I didn’t give him any part of me. He gave me all of him and I was closed off. My dad began making plans to remodel our bathroom, add another room and remodel our kitchen. Everything was moving so fast. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t prepared to be an adult. At 24 my dad was dying and I realized I hadn’t paid attention nearly enough to what he was showing me all my life. In the midst of all of this I think it’s a great idea to start college (it in fact was not a great idea).

So to put a time line to this, in September 2008 I find out my dad is dying of lung cancer. I also decide to change my job all around, start college, and have a new relationship. Mid October my dad begins his cancer treatment. I wish I could have taken him to more of his appointments but my uncle rich stepped in and took him to many of them. He began losing weight rapidly. Way faster than I ever expected. I was not prepared for this but I tried to pretend I was, for my dad's sake. We had always argued about everything. We were so much alike, the fiery passion for art and music. The want to have our own auto shop. But that Was not meant to be. None of that mattered anymore. My dad was sick and all I wanted for him was to be ok. He wasn’t going to be ok though and I knew that. So, I did what I could to help him be at peace. I started college that fall so he could see I would have a brighter future. He knew I wouldn’t get my shop and he knew it was going to be hard for me. But I did what I could to make him happy. I worked full time and went to school full time. Tried to balance it all and still be there for him.

I watched him go from the strongest man I had ever met to a shadow. I watched him shrink from 209 at 6’2 to 130 a 5’11. He was in constant pain and toward the end didn’t eat because the cancer had wrapped around his esophagus. That December I decided I would take my 2 week vacation I had been saving and spend time with him. I knew it was the last Christmas I would get with him and I wasn’t going to waste it. The first day of vacation I had gotten sick. Not a cold sick but a puking shitting frenzy with a fever that sucked the energy right out of me. My dad who must have been exhausted kept trying to check on me. This is the only time I yelled at him. He is going through chemo, has no immune system and I have been puking all day uncontrollably. So of course my dad goes to rite aide and gets me Pepto chews. My heart breaks because even though he is dying he still tries to help me. Thankfully this only lasts a day. I am soon back to 100%. During this time in my vacation we finish the extra room and bathroom. All of my dad's friends come together. Everyone that I have ever met in my life through my dad is there. My dad was loved by many. A weekend. A single weekend at least 50 guys that were a part of my childhood were there. They did everything from building the extra bedroom for him to finishing the bathroom so he could take a bath to splitting enough wood for the winter so I didn’t have to when I wasn’t working or going to school. My friends came too. The guys that had become my family the last few years came together with people I have known for my whole life to help my little family. That’s when I could see how much my dad meant to the people around him.

My dad always helped when he could. Even if that meant just a cot in the shop for someone to sleep. Or even a shifter ball for a 69 GTO. He was always there for everyone. He was always there for me even when I didn’t see it. He never handed me anything. He never made anything easier for me because I was his. I worked harder for it. He showed me things I never knew I could do. Unfortunately, I realized most of this after he died. He knew it would be hard for me in the world. He knew I had a temper and an even worse mouth on me. He would always ask me if I was going to be mean for the rest of my life. And I would always tell him gotta stick to what you’re good at. It wasn’t until later I realized he was just trying to tell me don’t be mad and don’t hold a grudge. That last one… that’s been hard, but I’m trying.

I didn’t know that those 2 weeks were the last 2 weeks at home he would spend. I didn’t know that, that new years eve when I went out and came home really drunk and watched P.S. I Love You with him was going to be the last time I got to watch a movie with him. Or the next morning when I puked up the blue Gatorade he gave me was the last time he would be there for me like that. I went back to work on a Monday… At 10 am I got a call from my mom that the hospital was admitting him and I left work not even a full day back from vacation. I went to the hospital where when I got there he was not breathing easily until he couldn’t at all. The nurses just stood there and it took everyone flipping out to help him. They intubated him so he could breathe and gave him a spit sucker….. Oh how I hated that spit sucker. The sound alone. I refused to leave him. They put him in ICU and I went home to get clothes because I wasn’t leaving that night. I think the icu nurse knew that because she let me sleep in his room that night. I sat in an uncomfortable chair while my dad watched tv and tried to tell me to take pictures of him… so I did. He hadn’t slept in so long. I just wanted him to rest. SO when my mom was on her way and I was leaving to go home and shower the next morning, I told my dad I loved him and told the nurse to give him something to help him sleep. I didn’t know it was the last time my dad would talk to me.

The next week seemed to be like blur. I didn’t go back to work I wanted him to be able to come home. I wanted him to get better. But he wasn’t going to get better he wasn’t going to wake up. He hadn’t taken care of himself and in multiple efforts to take care of me he had given himself pneumonia. The fluid in his lungs were just too much for him. This brings me to the day he died. I was doing some errands for my dad with a friend. My mother calls me and tells me she needs her phone charger. She has been crying, I can tell even though she doesn’t tell me. She says I really should come up there today as I have been avoiding it the last 2 days. So I ask my friend if he minded driving up to the hospital with me. He didn’t. When we got to the hospital I walk into a room full of people. Doctors, family members and my mom, her face flushed with tears. Before I say anything she says to the doctor “explain it to her.” Explain what? “well” he says “your fathers blood pressure keeps dropping and we have a few more medications to try…” “ok so try them” I say. They give him another dose of a medication. “well you see” the doctor says “the antibiotics don’t seem to be working, I have the head of infectious diseases coming up to speak with you.” In walks a shorter woman, I would describe her more if I could remember but I don’t. She was useless in this situation other than she made me mad. My father has been in the hospital the last 8 days and hasn’t been awake for 6 of them I knew the score here. I kept asking my father's doctor if he can wake up and what medications they had him on. Every time the doctor would go to talk this woman kept interrupting him saying that we needed a few days to see if the antibiotics were working. At this point I knew a few things, 1) this bitch was gonna get hit, 2) My dad's blood pressure was dropping to death levels, he may not have a few days or even hours, 3) he didn’t want to be a vegetable on machines. All I need to know at that moment to make any deciscion was does my dad have a chance of waking up? Does he have brain activity? As I was asking this of the Doctor this woman decides to interrupt for the last time… I took a step towards her in one of those slow-motion movie moments where everything slows down, I took that step forwards and noticed everyone else in the room took a step back except my friend who took a step with me ready to grab the storm about to erupt from me. But I calmed in the step and told her as nicely as I could manage that I was not talking to her. Looking back I don’t think really anybody in that room knew why I was so mad or why I was asking if he had brain activity. I wanted to know if my dad was still my dad or just a body kept alive by machines. That’s all I wanted to know. He didn’t want that. I didn’t want that. I don’t really remember a whole lot in the minutes after that. I do know the woman left and everyone else asked if I was ok. The doctor had a woman come up and test him to see if there was brain activity. We all left the room so she could preform whatever test she needed to. The conclusion was he has brain stem activity, which I knew just meant the machines were doing their jobs. My dad was no longer there and there was no reason to keep going with medications that weren’t going to do anything to bring him back. The doctor said there was one more medication they could try to bring his blood pressure back up but I had already decided. We were done. He was done. In the next hour there was so much that happened it felt like everything was going too fast. I had to get paper work in to make sure he could donate his body. When everything was done everyone gathered in his room to say goodbye. The machines were shut off and his body died. Everyone just left. I asked my friend if it was ok if we hung out in his room for a while. I wasn’t ready to go home. Of course Eddy was ok with that. Whatever I needed. We sat there in a hospital room with a dead body for over a half hour so I could get my shit together enough to not lose it at home. I finally was ready to leave. I asked if we could stop at the liquor store on the way home. I got a bottle of jack that I opened that day and finished on that day a year later.

That entire day was an emotional mess. It was a game changer. I was walking into the unknown without the person I relied on the most. I had no idea how to live, how to find myself without my dad. I have always thought of myself as a pretty badass bitch. I knew how to work hard, I knew how to play hard, and I knew how to hang with the boys like one of the boys and still be a girl. At that moment I didn’t know how to be me anymore. I questioned my abilities to work on cars even though I knew I was right. It was awful feeling like I had no guidance. What was worse was watching my mom not know how to help me. When I would lose it because I couldn’t just call my dad to ask a question. It took years, it took me breaking many times and trying to build myself back up. It took me deciding I can make it without him. I never wanted to but now I had no choice. I had to pick myself up and figure it out.

I am now 33 years old, married, with step kids that my dad would have adored. I work in the auto industry, maybe not how I wanted to be but I am still here. There are days that are still hard. There are days I still wish he was a phone call away. When my kids say they wish they would have met him I tell them that he would have loved them. My daughter with a fierce personality that loves working on cars and riding horses. My son that is an athlete and is a straight A student. I try to be a little more like my dad and not get worked up about the small stuff. I try to forgive more than I hold grudge, but man do I know how to hold a grudge. I’m learning, I’m really trying to be a better person. To be the person my dad would have been proud of. I definitely have some moments that I know you wouldn’t have been happy about however I think, I hope that more often than not he can smile down and say “that’s my girl!”