Precious Moments with Dad, Volume II

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" came last Friday, and we couldn't wait to see it. My brother Tim recently got laid, so we were celebrating with the movie.. wait... he got laid off, laid OFF... BIG difference, apparently- so he came along to momentarily forget his lack of employment.

It is always entertaining to have a cohort along on my movie runs with dad, especially Tim, as he is one of the few individuals who enjoys tormenting dad, I mean enjoys dad as much as I do.

Saturday, dad had chest pains for about ten hours, which I believe are completely unrelated to Keanu Reeve's oaken performance. I found out about them Sunday morning, and drove to see him when I got out of work. The chest pains were gone, but dad was stuck with shortness of breath and a lack of willingness to go to the hospital. Can't say that I blamed him on a Saturday night. The emergency room on a weekend is a nightmare, not that it is a picnic the other five days of the week, either.

Dad decided to go to his primary care doctor Monday. upon arrival, where after being chastised for yet another goofy self-diagnosis, he was tossed into an ambulance, his doctor thinking he had had a heart attack Saturday. As it turned out, he in fact, had not had a heart attack, which was good news.

Upon hearing this, pop pumped his fist, saying with great satisfaction, "I KNEW I didn;t have any heart attack. I know my body better than these a**holes! Haha!"

I hated to break up the party, but I felt compelled to point out that laying in bed for ten hours and skipping a day's worth of meals as a solution for chest pains was probably not that ingenius, adding that dieing of heart failure is no way superior to dieing from a heart attack, though I am sure en route to the great beyond dad would be filled with personal satisfaction at being "right".

Being right, after all, is far more important than anything else. Dad is a guy who would defiantly stand in a crosswalk, pointing at it to denote he had the right of way even as a truck ran him over.

Even though my poor father had to spend the entire day and night in a room at the e.r., it wasn't all bad. When the attending nurse came in, we asked what the different numbers stood for on the monitor. The top one was heart rate. The middle showed wjhat percentage of oxygen was actually getting through, and the bottom one was respiration.

"So the bottom one would read zero if for example, someone held a pillow over the patient's face?"

Without missing a beat., the nurse said straightfaced, "yes, that's correct" and left.

A short while later, dad commented that his derriere, if I am spelling ass corectly, hurt from not moving. I lifted him higher in the bed, then slipped on a plastic glove, saying, "turn on your side, dad... I wanna check something."

This getting old is serious business, but I have to commend my father and mother for never losing their sense of humor. After they determined that pneumonia was the culprit, they gave dad some antibiotics and made a few suggestions for him to ignore.

I said aloud from the hall where I stodd with my step-mother, "no Louise, I don't see anything here in the instructions about administering a rolling pin or frying pan... oh, that's to make YOU feel better."