Summer following the surgery

The remainder of the summer following my dad’s first brain surgery was extremely long, or at least it seemed like it. There were daily trips to Terre Haute or Indianapolis for doctor’s appointments, radiation treatments, or chemotherapy treatments. My mom had to run our family business which even without the treatments that would have kept her busy because during the summer we have thirty or more dogs consistently in the kennel which is pretty much a twenty-four hour a day deal because the dogs constantly need to be turned out, fed, or watered. So, that first summer my mom was run pretty much into the ground, but with the help of my sister, Andrea, my grandma, and my grandpa she managed to do it all, which I think is pretty amazing. My dad hated the fact that he couldn’t help my mom more, but he tried to do his part by mowing and turning dogs out, but him being sick made me take on a lot more responsibility than I ever had before, I started to take the trash out, mow some, but just out in the big, wide-open areas around the house because my mom didn’t rust me on the mower, help water the dogs in the kennel, and feed the inside dogs, this was a huge step up from the stuff I had done before, which was basically nothing.


After my dad’s operation the doctor’s had said a complication from the surgery could be blood clots, and several weeks after the surgery my dad started having swelling in his legs, which is a sign of blood clots. After a trip to Paris Hospital and a sonogram on his legs it was determined that my dad had multiple blood clots in both of his legs, which was scary because it doesn’t take much for a clot to move to your heart or brain and cause a heart attack or stroke. The clots if they were just one clot, instead of multiple clots they probably would have been minor, but with it being multiple clots the doctors were all very concerned and had my dad stay three nights in the hospital which worried all of us because you never want somebody you love to be in the hospital for any amount of time, for anything. My dad stayed and was put on blood thinners, one in a pill, and the other in a shot, that had to be given by a doctor or nurse, so two of my mom and dad’s friends came out to the house and gave my dad the shots every single day. My dad to this day is still on the pill form of the blood thinner because he is still at extremely high risk of developing another one which could be even more dangerous than it was back then because his leg is almost always swollen , which means there is no physical sign of a blood clot.

My dad getting the blood clots, taught me that even though they got all of the tumor through the surgery, other equally dangerous stuff suddenly pop up out of nowhere.