Our family received some stunning news last week J (my wife) has an aortic aneurysm. She was immediately put on low blood pressure medication, and we scheduled an appointment with a heart surgeon (we see him today). Our initial thought was to conceal things from the kids. Not knowing the story – whether this meant immediate surgery or close observation – we thought we could avoid scaring them. We just told them she was sick, and on some medicine that made her sleepy all the time. <\/p>\n
Our plan didn’t work. Everywhere we went, people approached J with “you’ll be in our prayers” and “please take care of yourself” and “I’m so sorry!”<\/p>\n
Our five year old caught on quick. He started clinging to his mom, saying things like “don’t leave me!” and “what if you die?”<\/p>\n
It was time for plan B. <\/p>\n
During dinner, I explained what was going on to the kids. Their mom listened, chiming in occasionally when I stumbled or they needed reassurance. The kids were already familiar with veins, so I explained that an aneurysm as a blister on one of mom’s veins. I pointed out that since it was inside her, the doctors couldn’t use a bandaid. Instead, we had to see lots of doctors, and do lots of test, and develop a plan for how we were going to help mom get better.<\/p>\n
They listened. They were attentive. They nodded at the appropriate times. Then, when it was all done, I asked if they understood and if they had any questions.<\/p>\n
C nodded. “Uh-uh. So, do we get to go to the playground after school?”<\/p>\n
That’s my boy. Always keeping things in perspective!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our family received some stunning news last week J (my wife) has an aortic aneurysm. She was immediately put on low blood pressure medication, and we scheduled an appointment with a heart surgeon (we see him today). Our initial thought was to conceal things from the kids. Not knowing the story – whether this meant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8Es","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}