I have a sister, obviously by the title her name is Suzi. Though if you were to meet her you would address her as Sue, if you didn’t know her and you were meeting her professionally you would call her Susan. My reason for this post was I am suppose to be starting to promote my book and I will do that however not today. Today I want to talk about my sister. You may wonder why at such a critical time in promoting and publishing am I choosing to talk about my sister instead of making you more aware of the awesomeness of my achievement, instead of selling the idea of my book to you so you will buy it or talk about it and generate energy and buzz for it to sell??? Because I want to promote the awesomeness of my sister. I want to create the energy and the buzz of her achievement so far. I want to share a sacred journey , the strength and courage of this strange and wonderful human who i call sister suzi.
April 22, 2022 my sister was working at one of her two jobs. While she was carrying out her duties around 9:20pm she collapsed to the ground. A customer who happened to be shopping checked her out and started cpr. My understanding is that he did so for 20 minutes until the first responders arrived who claimed she had no pulse however by the arrival of the paramedics she did have one. so id like to take a little side journey her for a second. I do not know if anyone reading this knows how physically demanding it is to preform cpr, however, it is work. not only is it hard on you physically, emotionally it will take its toll specially if it isn’t part of your job description ( and to be honest even if it is i imagine it still can take its toll) the cracking, the color change it isn’t pleasant. However some random stranger felt compelled to help my sister out and as grateful as i am to him, i am sure he suffers some scares from it.
thankfully she had a pulse and the paramedics carried onwards, loading her up and taking her to NRGH. (Nanaimo Regional General Hospital) She was not conscious though she did gain it while at hospital, very confused and reputative question. They were giving her a scan when she went into cardiac arrest again. this time it was one round of compressions so it total aprox 2 minutes. At this point in time they had to intubate. For anyone that doesn’t know what this means is that they had to put her on support so she could breath and live. life support.
Once on support they called my Mom. Approximately 12:20 i got a call from my mom very upset that suzi was in the hospital and it wasn’t good. Right about here is where people get mad. Why didn’t i get called right away? why is it 3 hours later and i am just finding out. So let me clear this up for you… they are busy saving your special someones life and the patient it the first priority. as it should be.
Now i am pretty calm in most crises situations, i have had a few things that have taught me that loosing it wont help. dont let me fool you i was vibrating, i was 100% in flight or fight mode. I calmly asked my mom what she needed from me, if she wanted me to pick her up. she lives close to the hospital so she said no just meet her at the hospital. The moment my phone was down i was tossing on my clothes yelling at my husband that we had to go..vibrating the whole time, telling him i didn’t have a good feeling we had to go and we had to go now.. the poor man could not move fast enough…no matter how fast he was going i needed him to go faster. once in the car i called my dad, let him know what was going on and that suzi was in the hospital.. and would let him know more once there.
I knew i wasn’t going to like the situation at the hospital before i even got there. I knew that my sister was in rough shape though i had no idea how rough. Unfortunately i had seem my grandson on life support so i knew what i was going to be looking at once i knew that she was on support. I was somewhat prepared, what i was not prepared for was watching my mom. it was so much like watching my son when his son was on life support and the helplessness you feel as a parent not being able to help your child. I felt it watching my son watch his son and here i was again feeling it only it was my mom watching my sister. I do as i always do and sucked it up, i would have my time later to cry or to feel right now i needed to be strong.. to be the strength for my mom and the strength for my sister.
I cant tell you everything that i said or did, however, one moment sticks out in my mind as if it happening right now. I stroked my sisters hair back and said oh suzi re look at you, and with that a single tear ran down her cheek. my heart broke, i knew she knew. i don’t really know what i thought she knew, that it was bad, that i was there ,knew that my heart ached when i stroked her hair, i guess what i knew she knew was that i loved her. it was one of those moments that you can’t really put into words its like you communicate on some other level. i am not going to tell you that i had peace in knowing that she knew i was there or that it made it better cuz i knew she could sense me. I was grateful she wasn’t alone, however, knowing didn’t ease my fight or flight.
i asked my questions, what happened, how long, what did they do, what damage was done during the process, sounds like a stroke not a heart attack, why the cpr what are the effects of that, so did she have two ruptures and that is why her heart stopped twice, how long did it take for them to figure out she had an aneurysm, what was the out come, how long did we have till the helicopter comes to take her to Vancouver. Yep i had a lot of questions and i wanted answers and in between, get mom water find a chair, call dad to find out where the f he is, call her kids, call her ex, call her exs new wife, call your sister where the fuck is everyone. repeat. leave messages. send my husband to find my dad cause the helicopter has arrived and damn it he needs to see her before she goes. its bad and i know its bad. even if i wanted to believe it wasn’t as bad as i knew it was you can feel it in the air, see it in the eyes of the nurses.
the air ambulance team shows up, still no dad, still no answers from anyone else. we have to leave because they need to move her from the bed she is on to one that is going into the whirly bird. they have to reassess and set up all the tubes and lines attached to her. They tell me i have a bit of time to phone and get things sorted while they do this and promise me i will be able to see her before they take her.
I walk out of the special room they have for us with mom to see dad and jason walking in.. My dad got lost and thankfully my husband went and found him. however he was going to have to wait to see suzi now. I watched my parents age years in a bit of a few moments. My parents have been divorced for so very long, the majority of my life and here they sat, together the only two in the room that understood each others pain. When the nurse said suzi was ready and that we could say good bye for her flight and we could go two at a time. my parents got up and walked into the special room holding hands, supporting each other in an ache i hope to never understand. They didn’t know if they were saying goodbye for today or forever.