According to Mayoclinic.org, stroke occurs when the blood supply to part of your brain is interrupted or reduced, preventing brain tissue from getting oxygen and nutrients. Brain cells begin to die in minutes.
I was 11 years old when my father had a stroke, we had moved from the city he lived in due to my mother’s and his separation and we only saw during weekends but communicated frequently. We immediately knew something was wrong when he didn’t show up on the weekend he was supposed to and the calls to him proved abortive but because we were states away we couldn’t rush to find out what was wrong.
My father lived like a loner so we didn’t have the option of calling friends to check up on him so the only solution was to send my brother to travel to the city he stayed to find out if everything was alright.
You might ask why we were paranoid after not hearing from him was just a day but if you knew my father, you would understand better. He was a proper gentleman and he had a set of rules he always followed through, one which was canceling a plan if another came up.
I can remember when we got a call from my brother telling us how he found my father on the floor, evidently, he had been there for days and he didn’t have anyone to help him out. My father was rushed to the hospital and was at that point in critical condition because he wasn’t found immediately, I remember washing dishes at the time and bursting into tears scared that I was losing my father, as a certified daddy’s girl this hurt like hell because I didn’t know what a stroke even was, I related every sickness that wasn’t malaria as a death sentence.
After my breakdown, all I wanted to do was to know more about what he had and I began surfing the net. Apparently, there were different kinds of stroke, the names of some were Ischemic stroke, Hemorrhagic stroke, and transient ischemic attack and through this, I figured out that my father had the ischemic stroke which is the loss of blood supply or hemorrhage in the brain. He was at risk of this stroke because he was diabetic and had a high blood pressure, other people at risk could be those who smoke, have high cholesterol, and people with heart rhythm disturbances.
I wouldn’t lie I didn’t care about a lot of the things I read because I was shocked at the fact that the father I saw normal two weeks ago was suddenly lying in a hospital and I could even see him because I was in a different state and had school in the morning like I cared about school.
All I could do the next day was overthink and blame myself because I felt like if I was closer I would have detected it earlier, it is said that certain things like face drooping, arm weakness, and speech difficulty among others would be a way of detecting when a stroke is about to happen and I could not shake off the fact that just maybe, as usual, early detection would have helped him a little bit.
He finally woke up after numerous treatments and the months that followed was the hardest for us. He had become paralyzed in the right side of his body due to the violation of the process of outflow of blood in the part of his brain and with that came the loss of the ability to speak and walk, he had to have everything done for him down to aid to the restroom.
After the months spent in the hospital, a decision was made to move him down to where we stayed and immediately he got here, he started physical therapy. I can still hear his screams when he went through this process but gradually he got a little better. A year after, he was learned how to walk better, eat on his own and mumble out words even though sometimes it was incoherent and we felt like it was going to get better.
A few months to my graduation I had gotten a call that my father had been bleeding from his penis which led to him being rushed to the hospital. The doctors said the surgery had to be done to stop the bleeding and relieve the pain he was in and we agreed.
Before the surgery was the last time I saw my father because after it he became lifeless and the hospital gave up and told us to take him home, he gradually became worse and worse and the night before the day we had decided to take him back to the hospital, he died.
I guess he was tired of all the pain he was going through and he didn’t want to go back to the same place that told him to leave. I remember the morning, we found him, and after 9 years he finally had peace. My one regret was not being able to tell him how much I loved him.
I still think of how different it might have gone if we found him earlier and that continues to haunt me.
A picture of my father
REFERENCES
Mayoclinic.org
cdc.gov
Thank you for opening this box of passion