my first intermediate writing assignment {got an A-}

Tristen Fagg
1/26/09
IW: Science and Values

My Emotional Technological Story

It was July 3, 2007 when I got the phone call that felt like the end of the world. As a girl who comes from a very large and tightly knit family I have the capacity to care a great deal about others. And when those I care for are in danger of any kind I rely on the technological advances of my generation to help save them. Whether it be a new model of weapon in the hands of a police officer or the machines that keep one on life support during a coma. Technology, though some attest it in its many forms, saves lives. And I am grateful for it.
I was getting ready for work when the phone rang. It was my sister, Trayci. She said, "I don’t want you to worry, but we need your prayers." I froze. My mind was eerily crystal clear for about three seconds while she explained what had happened. My 65 year old father, located in Las Vegas, had had a heart attack. Open heart surgery was imminent. Doctor’s speculated a quadruple by-pass. He had felt it coming and gotten to the hospital twenty minutes before the heart attack hit. Had he been anywhere else he would have died from complications.
My heart began racing and I started pacing as my mind went wild with possibilities. Instead of listening to my sisters calming attempts my mind was bringing up and discarding ideas of how to get from Cedar City to Las Vegas in rapid succession.
I need to get to Vegas, I thought, Drive?
My car won’t make it.
Bus fare?
I have no money.
I have to get there....
And soon....
But how?
As the youngest member of my family I have grown accustomed to getting what I want. Those who do not know me would call me a spoiled control freak. I prefer to think of myself as determined and self motivated. If I want something badly enough, I will find a way to get it. And if I cannot have what I want, I do not want it anymore. I wanted to get to Las Vegas. I needed to get to my father. To make sure he lived. To make sure he knew I loved him. I realized my mere presence had no affect on whether he lived or died but he sure as hell was not going to die while I was a state away twiddling my thumbs and pretending my world was still intact.
I suddenly remembered Trayci on the phone and started paying attention. She was telling me the story of what had happened.
For the past year or so my father had been employed at Wal-Mart. Not as a greeter, he’s not quite that old yet, but as a hardware specialist. The employee parking was about a quarter of a mile away from the store and it was in the middle of summer in the Las Vegas desert so you can imagine the temperature hindered my dad’s progress to his place of employment. Usually by the time he got into the store he was winded so he would sit and rest for a minute or two, just to catch his breath. He would then progress to the back of the store and begin working. Right on time, of course, because my father was never one for tardiness.
On this particular day he barely made it through the parking lot. He sat and waited to catch his breath but noticed a slight "fluttering" feeling in the space between his throat and his clavicle. Five minutes passed and he still was not feeling well enough to start working, or to even get up and start walking again. So he got on his cell phone and called his house. My brother, Thayne, in town from Provo for my dad’s birthday party the previous day, answered the phone. Per my dad’s request he picked him up and drove him to the hospital, calling my mother on their way. She met him there not even two minutes later and within another five minutes he was checked in and sitting on an exam table. He began describing his experience to the attending doctor and asked, "Did I have a heart attack?"
"No," the doctor replied, "It would have been a much stronger sensation than that."
They got my dad a nitrogen patch and applied it to his chest with the prediction that it would calm his heart and subdue his symptoms. But within seconds my dad felt more ill than before. He started vomiting and while he was bent over the bucket the heart attack hit.
The doctor had been leaning against the door frame while the nurses attended to my fathers needs and my mother swears she heard him mutter, "NOW, you’re having a heart attack."
They were able to control my fathers pain while the heart attack lasted. And when it finished they immediately took him to examining rooms and ran tests to know how severe the heart valves were blocked. More detailed information than that I cannot tell you because my mom was the only one to receive the full report and she did not understand most of it. After my dad had been rolled away and she was left to worry, she called everyone she could think of to spread the news. That is how I ended up frozen in silent debate with myself and on the phone with Trayci. I was still in shock so when she asked if I was ok and told me she needed to make some more calls I nodded to myself and hung up. I stood in the middle of my front room staring through the window at my broken down red Buick and let my mind churn.
The phone rang again. It was my sister, Trudi, my roommate and yin to my yang. She asked me if I had talked to Trayci already. I remembered to speak this time, instead of just nodding. She told me she had talked it over with a co-worker of hers and knew how we were going to get to Las Vegas but that I was going to have to wait until she got off work at 3:30pm. I glanced at the VCR clock, hopefully. It read 9:47am in thin green digital numbers. My heart sunk to the bottom of my stomach and I hung up the phone yet again. I called my boss and told him what was happening. He gave me the week off.
Great, I thought, now there’s nothing to keep my mind off the drama and death.
I would have hated working with customers while in shock for fear of exploding over something as small as a complaint but sitting at home, creating ways to distract myself from everything that was so out of my control was not going to help me either. I experimented with different distractions. Cleaning, I hypothesized out keep my hands and my mind busy enough. Failed. My hands did the scrubbing and I caught myself more than once not even looking at the soap stains on the tub, gazing off into the dismal future; the future where my kids grew up without a grammpa.
Distraction theory number two: shower. I don’t even know what I was thinking on this one but it failed miserably. The shock wore off and the noise of the shower was enough to cover the sounds of my crying. In short I ended up curled in the fetal position while scalding water rained over me and mixed with the tears. After about thirty minutes of that I got out and the phone rang. My sister, Taneil this time. She told me, with tears in her voice that dad was going into surgery and that everything was going to be okay.
I countered with, "You don’t know everything’s going to be okay. Are you a doctor Taneil, because they sounded pretty worried, according to Trayci."
"Whether dad comes out of surgery or not, Tristen, everything IS going to be okay."
At that point in the conversation the sorrow disappeared and the rage took over. I swore at my sister, for the first time in my life. And I angrily hung up the phone, wishing I could slam it on the receiver like the good old days before wireless took over. The rage subsided and the sorrow began again. I had been angry because I knew she was right.
In my religion we believe that mortal life is not the end. Death is not the end. Life on earth is a testing period, where one proves his worth by following the commandments placed before all men by Heavenly Father. And it is by one’s faith, obedience and works that one is saved, not by grace alone. Death, according to my belief, is the graduation from the testing period to the judgement period. Following which one is placed into the kingdom of heaven one deserves.
My father would be okay. I would be okay if he died. I knew that. It would be hard living without him. It would be hard raising children in a world where he did not exist anymore. But I believed, I knew I would see him again. That he would be happier wherever he was headed for.
But that was not what I wanted. So I refused to accept even the possibility of him dying because of this pathetic heart attack. What was a heart attack, a three minute convulsing of the heart, a mere muscle, to my powerhouse of a father? There was no way he was leaving me because of a muscle.
With this new found determination I made a few phone calls of my own. Some friends helped me get through the longest part of the day by watching movies and letting me talk or not talk, as the mood struck me. I will be forever in their debt.
Trudi got home at 3:30pm, as promised and we made our way to her co-workers son’s place of employment. We borrowed his car and made it to Las Vegas in record time. An hour or so of waiting with some of my siblings on the remarkably comfortable couches and attempting to distract ourselves, either with conversation or watching t.v. and we were fetched by the nurses. They calmly explained that the surgery went well and that he was still in recovery. A collective sigh of relief swept through the group huddled around the informants and we all hugged each other and wept softly on shoulders.
Another hour came and went and we were able to see him. They warned us that he would not remember anything said to him tonight. And that he would look terrible. But they did not warn us enough. My mother was the first to go in. She returned to us in record time and she sought me out and hugged me long and hard. A few tears later she said quietly, "I’m not a widow. He hasn’t left me yet."
I grasped her hands and squeezed them, trying to give her some of my newly found strength. It was then that I noticed the extra jewelry on her fingers. My dad’s wedding band and CTR ring. I realized I had not been the only one in denial. While calming every one of her children, one by one, my mother had been in constant grief. Expecting to be robbed of the one and only man she had ever loved. I alone saw those true feelings in her eyes. In every tear that ran down her face I glimpsed a different emotion. Fear, worry, impatience, relief, happiness. Gratitude.
We were ushered into his room, in small groups of two or three. I went with Taneil, the sister I had cursed for telling me the truth. She and I are the closest in age, even if we are very different personalities. All throughout my life we have been warned not to tough dad’s feet. He is deadly ticklish. Deadly because if you tickled him, you were dead. And he was always a jumpy sleeper. Not a light or heavy sleeper but if he heard you whisper his name he jumped as if you had yelled. My sister and I, clutching hands and holding our breath, watched him sleep. His skin was yellowish and the tubes and cords strapped to his pasty skin were disconcerting.
We were both so scared of frightening him we stood still and quiet for a few minutes, whispering to each other, "I’m not going to wake him up. You wake him up."
"No way. He’ll have another one. I’m not going to kill him. You wake him up."
Finally we got the guts to whisper his name with increasing degrees of volume and strength until he woke up. He just moaned and whimpered, squirming and breathing heavily. I could feel my heart breaking at the sight of my father in such pain. I quickly chocked out the words, "I love you, Dad," before exiting the room and crouching between shelves in the nearest hallway, crying and attempting to pull myself together. Taneil found me and we went back to the waiting room to give the next group the opportunity to see my father’s pain.
True to the doctors words, my dad did not remember anything said that night after the surgery. The following two or three days were hard on all of us. He was improving but was still in incredible pain. The most memorable part of this whole experience was when he asked my mother to call everybody into his room. He professed to eternal love for each and every one of us and prayed that we took better care of our bodies so as not to have to go through what he had just been through. My grandfather, his dad, had had a heart attack a few years before his death and my dad went on about how he finally understood his father’s final years. Then he bore his testimony of Jesus Christ and how much he loves all of us. I later wrote a poem based on this conversation which I have included.
He stayed in the Intensive Care unit for a week and was out of the hospital within the following week. And since then my father has gone through the normal recovery process, feeling depressed one day and invigorated the next. If he feels good enough to do some work around the house he keeps going and going like he used to. But then cannot leave his bed the next day except to shower and eat a few meals. It has been a year and half since he was in the hospital and I wonder if he will ever fully recover his old energy.
I am so glad he felt the need to go to the hospital that day. I am so grateful for the technology that has been invented to help heart attack sufferers and that my dad was able to benefit from those advances. I am happy my father still lives, even if he is a little more grumpy and demanding than he used to be. I hear that’s normal, anyway.

good news

my financial aid cleared last week! yay, i know. but even with that burden taken off my back im still suffering because of poor finance choices. i admit it. i WAS a terrible spender. not happening anymore--no money to spend at the wrong places or on the wrong things. so i was considering taking out a loan. it would only be for $1750 and wouldnt need to be paid back till i graduated. but then...i got a letter in the mail saying i had been accepted for the nevada WUE scholarship. basically nevada and utah have a bargain with each other that if a student that went to a high school in one state goes to college in the other state, the state they graduated high school from covers the students college fees in hopes that they come back and use their degree in nevada some how.
its $6000+ per year. thats $3000+ per semester and because im a resident i only require $2000+ per semester. as long as i keep a 3.0 gpa and dont major in elementary education.
i read something in the fine print about students that wanted to gain residency for tuition purposes had to decline the scholarship.
hello, brick wall number one.
i called the financial aid office and asked if i counted as a student that had obtained residency for the purposes of tuition if i had lived here for three years prior to starting at suu and they said no! yay! the scholarship doesnt cover until fall semester '09 but by then i'll be covered for everything else too. and if i can get that small loan this semester to cover living expenses, i might be able to pay it all back with the extra money i receive from the WUE scholarship.

AND i can major in english and minor in education if i wanted to become a teacher later on. it doesnt stop me from teaching period, just from majoring in it. no problem

i find the longer im in school and have to deal with all these technicalities and guidelines, the more im learning to find loopholes and other ways to trick the system. haHA! college is good for something! haah jk its good for a lot of things. hehe

<3 tristy-la