At the time of me sitting down to write this post it’s been about seven months since my dad passed away. Just dictating that sentence got me choked up for second. I finally feel comfortable enough to start writing a few little stories I’ve been wanting to tell about my dad. I jotted down a bunch of ideas in January and I hope to remember more of them. Some stand on my mind more than others. Here goes.
My dad was a physicians assistant. Since I was pretty little he had worked in an emergency room. He loved the excitement of a good trauma. From every indication he was really good at it also. Being trained in medicine and working in an emergency room you tend to gauge or triage things differently than someone who probably doesn’t save lives for a living.
When someone would ask him to do something, usually my mom and claim that it was urgent to him. His response would be something like how badly are you bleeding? If the answer was not a lot or not at all then he would reply that is not urgent.
So basically to him unless you’re bleeding it’s not urgent. To take it a step further he said on several occasions that you’re not really bleeding unless blood shooting across the room and splattering on a wall somewhere. He was basically describing an aortic bleed.
That was my dad. He was pretty black-and-white on those kind of things. Of course I knew exactly where I stood when you needed him to make an urgent priority call.