Re-write This I Believe

What is love? Love is many different things, happiness, friendship, fear, luck, feeling emotions and much more. Love makes your heart grow stronger, but I believe it makes your heart grow bigger. For me love is all the above but mostly fear. I remember the day I feared for the life of my dad like it was happening all over again.
It was Friday March 14, 2008, grad day at universal studios. However, I was not going to grad day because I had a softball tournament. So that morning is when it all began. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and woke up two of my teammates who had spent the night at my house because I was taking them to the tournament. We left the house at 6:00 a.m. and fifteen minutes later is when it all began. My dad woke up that morning and felt dizzy, he had a sharp pain behind his eye, and the left side of his body went numb. He quickly awakend my mom and told her that he didn’t feel so well and she called 911. The paramedics arrived shortly there after and most of my dads symptoms were gone, but they took him to the emergency room for precautions. The ER doctor ruled it a TIA, (transient ischemic attack) which is a mini stroke.
It was now three o’clock and I was headed back from miami and had not talked to my parents all day. I could not get a hold of my mom nor my dad and knew something was up, because my dad always calls me to ask how my games went and how I did. As soon as I got home I was greeted by my grandparents who were out doing yardwork and I noticed my dad’s car was still in the driveway. I asked my Nana why his car was still in the driveway and she told me he woke up this morning and wasn’t feeling well so I immediately started walking towards his bedroom so I could tell him about my games when my Nana stopped me and said he is not in their, he is at the hospital. My eyes filled with tears rapidly and slowly rolled down my cheeks one by one. My mom walked in the door with my brother, they had gone to get lunch, she told me to shower and that we would go see him after we ate lunch. I had taken the quickest shower of my life and we were soon on our way to the hospital.
When I stepped in his hospital room he was sitting up and already on his blackberry back at work talking to customers. He looked up, smiled, and cracked a joke, I couldn’t even tell he had just had a stroke. We sat and talked to him, but less than twenty minutes later he got the worst headache of his life that would stay for three days. He suddenly got all the symptoms of a stroke again, numbness, headache, dizziness, pain behind his eye, and loss of speech. My mom quickly ran to get his nurse, but she did not arrive for five minutes and no doctor came to help for what felt like an eternity. When the doctor came they brought him down to ICU, but the doctor was to late to witness the symptoms and could not give us an explanation to what just happened. They continued to watch him down in ICU. Eventually, they took him to get an MRI, whiched showed that he had a bleed in his brain. They put him on blood thinners and said that it was the only thing they could do for him. They hoped that the bleed would clot on its own, but in trying to prevent the stroke from getting even larger he had to go on the blood thinners. Now it was sitting and waiting. That night we sat and waited with our family, friends, and my dad’s co-workers. After everyone left I was still their, sitting in the waiting room. I told my mom that I would not leave because they weren’t sure that my dad would make it through the night. She convinced me to let my boyfriend take me home who would not leave my side. But when I got home I could not sleep, I feared the phone rining in the middle of the night. At some point I had cried myself to sleep.
The next morning I woke up and immediately went back to the hospital, but there was no change in my dads condition, they were still unsure whether or not he was going to make it. The bleed in the brain kept getting larger and his headache kept getting worse. We sat all day in the waiting room on Saturday, but it was not till Sunday that my dad starting feeling better. That day I got to see him and talk to him for a while. Its amazing how quickly someone can go down hill. He had trouble moving and couldn’t feed himself very well. I watched him eat and he fed himself like a two year old would. As he finished eating the doctors came in to talk to him and said that if he was still doing well by Monday morning they would do a proceedure on him. It was risky but nessisary. Monday morning rolled around quickly and they did the proceedure. He made it through and the doctors came to the conclusion that plauque from one of his arteries broke off and traveled up to his brain which caused the stroke.
It is now seven months later, he has had another stroke, and he now has a heart monitor in his chest. He has short term memory loss and does not remember the day he had his stroke and the many days after that either. He sometimes walks with a cane because his whole left side in numb. He has come a long way since then. I have always loved my dad, but through this experience I realized that I never want to go a day without my dad. I really appreciate him and everything he has done for me. For this, I believe in love.