Getting “The Call” – That My Father Had a Stroke In Singapore

….Written from a hospital in Singapore…

Jeff and I had just finished three days of speaking at the amazing HIM conference in Hawaii, had had a restful night sleep, a leisurely breakfast, and were just about to start our mini-two day vacation around beautiful Oahu. It was Sunday morning of March 22, and we were packing our satchel with everything we’d need for a day on the North Shore, when my phone rang.

It was my brother, calling from Singapore, where he lives – and where my parents had arrived for a visit two days before. Weird, I thought, it is 2:00 in the morning there.

That’s when I got that feeling.

You know the one. Where your stomach drops out and you feel a catch in your breathing.

“Shaun,” my brother said, “It looks like Dad is having a stroke.” He had woken up in the night at my brother’s home, and then was suddenly unable to speak and completely paralyzed on his left side; he had had, they found later, a massive “hyper-acute” stroke due to a blood clot in the main right artery to the brain. My mother yelled for help they rushed him to the hospital.

The next few hours were a blur; I emailed my staff, friends and prayer team and urgently asked for prayer. My healthy 72-year-old father and mother had been living a vigorous life in the mountains in Virginia and were months away from their 50th wedding anniversary.

Please, God. Please heal my dad.

It is amazing how much a family emergency puts everything in perspective. Jeff and I had a ton of “big” things on tap for the week ahead: not only our little mini-romantic vacation, but my deadline to turn in my next book after a year of work, some major meetings back home in Atlanta, being at the final big tennis matches of my daughter’s tennis team at school, and my husband’s upcoming annual reunion with some friends from law school.

Suddenly, all that went away, without me hardly noticing.

We instantly started figuring out how to get me to Singapore, originally very thankful that Hawaii is already halfway there! I was so grateful that I would only have a 13-hour flight instead of a 26-hour flight from Atlanta.

So I can hardly describe my sinking feeling when I realized: I didn’t have my passport. It was a Sunday, so there was no way to get an emergency passport or overnight my own from Atlanta.

I didn’t think please, please, please would get me on a plane or past customs in Singapore.

Nothing else to do by fly the 13 hours back to Atlanta, pick up my passport, hug my kids, and catch the next available flight to Singapore.

I finally arrived Singapore in the wee hours of Thursday morning, and at 7 am my brother and I left for the hospital.

I spent the whole day at the hospital Thursday, relieving my mom so she could get some sleep, spending every moment being so grateful that my Dad… is still my Dad. My brother said he knew Dad was okay when – even when he was trying to regain his speech – he was still cracking bad jokes.

And as I write this in the hospital room on Friday afternoon (Singapore time), I keep finding myself tearing up with gratitude for his progress – and for the remarkable perseverance of this amazing man. He’s gotten so much function back on his left side, and can speak, eat and walk. He’s working hard at the exercises to try to retrain his brain to get – for example – full function back in his left hand. He has not been “thrown” by the discovery that although he can read, write and do math, that his brain won’t yet do a simple sequencing puzzle (if you look at a small group of letters and numbers and draw an arrow from A, to 1, to B, what comes next?).

That deficit was hard for me to see, since my dad has always been one of the smartest guys I know; a Ph.D in Economics and about a hundred other credentials. But Dad didn’t let himself get fazed by the cognitive things he can’t yet do. He didn’t get grumpy, or morose. He didn’t go down a road of despair that he simply couldn’t figure out how to do a few of these things he’s always been able to do in about a nanosecond before. Instead, he cracked a few jokes with the Occupational Therapist, and decided to do whatever he could do to get better.

I’m so proud of my dad. I’m so glad I’m here. I miss my husband and kids, but this is where I need to be this week. Praying for complete, full, healing – and learning from one of the most amazing people I know.