The Shapiro Files

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Tough Week

Prior to posting this entry, I had composed a couple of random rants (one about my AT&T DSL headaches and another about audience rudeness on “American Idol” clone shows), but then something truly bad happened that pretty much made those two topics pretty darn insignificant in comparison. I received a call last week from Chris, my father’s girlfriend (shouldn’t there be a better word when talking about such relationships among people older than 18?) that my father had suffered a “heart event” and that he was in the hospital. Now before I go any further, let me cut to the chase: He’s OK now. The bottom line is that he suffered a minor heart attack, with two blockages in the same artery for which he’d undergone angioplasty over a decade ago. He had two stents (amazing technological development since his last surgery) inserted in that troublesome artery and he seems to be essentially on the road to recovery now.

As anyone can imagine, it’s a terrible thing to receive such a phone call about a parent. Unfortunately, it’s also one that I can’t say any of us in our family were terribly surprised to receive. My father would be the first to admit that he doesn’t live an active lifestyle and he has struggled with weight-related issues for pretty much his entire life. Over the last 10-15 years, he’s seen both of his knees give out and his weight escalate higher than it had ever been before. This combined with a very high-stress work situation and less-than-ideal eating habits certainly doesn’t make for the most positive prognosis.

All these years now, we’ve all be encouraging him to be more careful with his diet and try to be more active. But he’s pretty set in his ways. However, this latest event seems to have shaken him up a bit. So maybe it’ll be a mixed blessing and encourage him to take steps toward improving his general health.

But in all events, we’re certainly all relieved that what could have been a truly horrific event ended up with about as positive a conclusion as such awful things can have. I’m also glad to say that my father never lost his sense of humor during this whole ordeal. For those of you who don’t know him, despite considerable embarrassment it created for my brother and I growing up (and now our younger brother Kenneth), my father’s humor tends to run considerably on the scatological side of things. So in his honor, if any of you feel like passing on any “blue” or otherwise flatulence-related humor that I can forward to him, I’m sure he’d enjoy it. Of course, since I do like to run a family-friendly site here, let’s try not to go too overboard!

1 Comments:

  • We are very sorry to hear about your Dad's troubles, and hope he will have a quick and full recovery!!

    Love to all of you,
    Aunt Linda

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10/04/2006 12:24 PM  

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