June 14th 2014 I received a call while I was out of town that my dad had collapsed at my Aunt’s surprise birthday party. He was rushed to the hospital and kept overnight for monitoring. He was released the next day with instructions to follow up with his primary care physician. They weren’t able to provide any details to why he passed out. My dad can be very stubborn so he wouldn’t share with us what happened when he followed up with his doctor. He told us that his doctor just wanted him to start being more active and recommended him walking on a treadmill every so often. I found out about another follow up appointment that he was having on August 12th, 2014. I told my sister we should pop up so that we could hear for ourselves what was going on. Without my dad’s knowledge my sister and I showed up to the “appointment”, my sister started asking questions “If I had an appointment here why would I be here? After telling us several options, we asked if our dad was there. She provided us his room number and when we went back, we arrived just in time, the nurse was walking in tooJ The nurse explained that they wouldn’t be able to proceed with stints due to my dad having severe blockage in three arteries (98%, 96% and 95% blockage). The nurse expressed that they needed to do emergency triple bypass surgery first thing in the morning. On August the 13th, 2014 at 6:00 am my dad went into surgery for what seemed like FOREVER. As my family and I waited for someone to provide an update all I could do was be thankful that this could have resulted in something else.
July 24th, 2022 I received a call at 4:36 am that my dad was being rushed to the hospital. It was determined upon his arrival that he had an irregular heartbeat, they attempted to get his heart beat back in rhythm with medicine however that didn’t help. They eventually had to do a cardioversion to get him back in rhythm and that worked!
Due to the continued research and the help of the American Heart association my dad is still here😊
I walk so others don’t have to experience this!
