Blog. Interrupted.

Well, January is turning out to be the month that fracking sucks. A year ago, I lost my father.

At around 9:30 PM last night, I received a telephone call from my mother-in-law asking me to drive her to the hospital. My father-in-law had been in the hospital, except for about four hours, since before Thanksgiving. She received word that he had become "unresponsive" and had stopped breathing.

We arrived to find him in the Intensive Care Unit, with a ventilator assisting in his breathing. The doctor discussed several things with us, and he was scheduled for both an x-ray (to check pneumonia and whether he had aspirated) and a CAT scan (to see if he had had a stroke). Eventually my wife got a neighbor to watch The Young Lady and she came. My wife's older sister and her husband showed up. I left to spell the babysitter, after which one of my wife's other sisters and a niece both came. My wife came home around 4:00 AM.

We received a telephone call a few minutes ago and my wife is on the way back to the hospital. My father-in-law's heart had stopped and his pacemaker was having trouble keeping him going. While they said they would perform CPR, he had long ago asked for a "do not resuscitate" status, so I expect that his very long struggle with many illnesses is now at an end.