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#734 – Sick Sunday for Unca Mike, Part I – I See You
[I have to interrupt the last several installments of This is Where I Came In to recount the strange events of Sunday, April 26.]
Yesterday, Sunday, was going to be a big day for me on Full Tilt. My Relay For Life tournament was taking place at 3 PM, and I was confident that I was going to break my Sunday losing streak. I happened to wake up early so I played in the turbo satellite for the Sunday Brawl and won a seat. That good fortune should have been my tip-off that nothing on Sunday would go as planned.
Around the end of the satellite, I got a call from my brother Bart, who with his wife Shelli and their dog Ella, were visiting from Snowmass Village, Colorado. As I picked up my cell phone, I realized it was his fifth call.
Bart told me that an ambulance came at 3 AM to take our mom, who they were staying with this weekend, to the hospital because she couldn’t breathe. Her condition had stabilized and it appeared she did not have a heart attack. But she had a lot of fluid in her lungs, she was in intensive care, and they were trying to figure out what exactly had happened and what to do about it.
I was paralyzed with terror. Should I play the Sunday Brawl? What about the other afternoon tournaments? Would my mom be okay? What about the Relay tournament at three o’clock?
Jo Anne and I spent the afternoon and evening at the hospital with my mom, most of the time in the ICU. Luckily, because they need enough room for life-saving equipment and medical personnel, there was plenty of space for me to set up my computer and play poker. I opted not to play the big Sunday tournaments because (a) when my mother had trouble breathing, I had to abandon my tournaments to yell at the hospital staff; and (b) when she moved out of ICU into a private room, I had to play while carrying my computer across the hospital. Amazingly, I broke my Sunday losing streak during all of this. I picked up about $600 in tournament winnings so the day wasn’t a total tragedy.
And it looks like my mom will be okay. [As I was editing this late Monday afternoon, Jo Anne informed me that my mom had been discharged just a little while ago.] They were still doing tests and they had to dumb down the explanations for me, but it appears she did not have a heart attack and had none of the usual post-heart-attack damage. She had some blockage but not enough to automatically require surgery. (By the way, they don’t call it “surgery” or “operation” or “procedure.” The term of art these days is “intervention.” For example, “We are testing to see if there is enough blockage to require an intervention.”) My mom spent most of Sunday listening to me complain about poker while resting comfortably – as comfortably as you can rest with a catheter, 3 IVs, and multiple monitors sticking out of you.
The following is an unpaid, unsolicited advertisement for baby aspirin. Strangely my mom’s life was probably saved by baby aspirin. Those of us who are eligible to play in Senior poker tournaments (i.e., over fifty) recognize that baby aspirin prevents and mitigates heart attacks by preventing blood clots. My mom had been taking baby aspirin but lost the container in which she kept some OTC medicines handy, and therefore hadn’t taken it for a couple of weeks. When she could barely breathe or speak, and her husband was calling the ambulance in the middle of the night, she remembered that commercial about baby aspirin for heart attacks and got him to get her one. When she got to the hospital, she was not in very good shape but she was not having a heart attack and it appeared she never had one. One of the doctors theorized that her partial blockage became worse when she discontinued the baby aspirin and a blood clot may have formed, which made the condition life-threatening. The single baby aspirin she took that night may have been sufficient to dislodge the clot and to keep the blockage and clot from being fatal. Go baby aspirin!
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