First Posts Suck

First posts are always the hardest...I thought I would start off by telling you who I am. While I want this to be a "Hello, my name is..." sort of badge for you all, so of it will be kind of sappy and a little bit sad. So...buckle up, folks!

Yes, that IS me...thank you for asking!

As you can very well see in the picture above, I was a very, very, VERY fat and bald-headed baby. Thanks to my genetic predisposition, I inherited my families wonderful DNA when I was born. While the abundance of hair and fine physique were not awarded to me yet, my mother always told me that I was something special. I mean...if she didn't, I would've probably been worried. I grew up in the town of Plainfield, just outside of the city of Indianapolis, Indiana. I have to say my childhood was amazing. I loved every opportunity and memory I made in the home my parents provided for my brother and I. We had a pool put in when I was 6 years old, where it would become the highlight of my friendships all through school. My brother, Blake, had his own living room by the front door, where he would spend hours playing everything from Guitar Hero to Black Ops to Golden Eye 007. So many birthdays, Christmases, and Indy 500 parties were spent with beer, burgers, corn hole, and pool-side basketball. So many laughs came from this suburban house just like any other in the world. So why did one instance in time replace all of those happy memories with sadness and horror?

Flash forward to the year 2016. Senior graduation was underway and I was just about a month of graduating from high school. I had just started awkwardly dating, was finishing up my time as a senior in show choir, and was trying to make an A for my AP Bio class...it was terrible. I mean the bio part...try to stay far away from that class. It was hard. Anyway, my time at PHS was coming to a close. I was so happy to figure out where I was going to school, figuring out that Indiana State University was the place for me. I was applying for scholarships, powering off of a little under 5 hours of sleep a night, not knowing that it would progress into my college years.

The day of April 6th was like any other. Alarm set for 6:50 AM, breakfast while Mom drank her coffee, the morning news with the team of WTHR to catch up what is happening in the world. That day, my father was staying at home to work from his office, "on call" he would say. He was a bad ass traveling engineer. Funny thing: he would always tell me whenever we would go to the dentist or doctor's office --> "Hey, I helped build that machine if you didn't know." My dad was full of life and love, always poking fun at me in the morning to torture me before I was set to go off to school for the day. A daily routine of poking at me and telling me jokes. It was wonderful. However, I didn't know that the morning routine with Dad would never be the same after the 6th. Before heading off for the day, we said the normal 'I love you' before hopping in cars and putting it in gear to go off to school.

The school day ran normally, with the typical dread of wanting the school day to finish and head home for nap and homework. I knew that day my dad had to take our weed eater in for a repair. For some reason, our outdoor tools always had some sort of personal vendetta against our family. The mower cussed us out, the weed eater tried to murder us...regular schedule. Instead of taking his car that day, he drove my mom's standard teacher van. I beat my mom home from school that day. She was held back helping with show choir auditions and making admissions and cuts into the choir.

I pull up to the driveway with a van sitting outside of the garage. DAD! He's home. I couldn't wait to tell him all about auditions and not having to go through that long process anymore. Having my speech in mind, I open the front door to the garage and...what? He's not there. Grady comes bolting down the stairs to see me, greeting me with kisses and love as usual. After taking him outside, he comes racing back in, oddly not glaring at me for a treat. I look at him and he looks at me, staring for what feels like an hour. He finally turns to race back up the stairs. He never does that. This stare could only have meant that an ominous sign was coming.

In a slew of confusion and panic from finding my dad's phone in his office, Grady still at home, the van at home...it seems like he had gone somewhere. My mom called everyone. The only bad part came when we started looking around the house. Checking outside to see if he was doing yard work, checking the pool area to see if he was checking the skimmers...he was missing. That was...until I heard my mom scream for me from their upstairs bedroom to call 911.

It is hard to remember what happened that day. Putting the pieces of everything back together again is always hard, and not that many people know what really happened that day besides that my father had a heart attack. There wasn't just one victim that day. It was a massacre. My father was found unresponsive. The coroner called it a "widow-maker" heart attack. Want to know why they call it that? Because it comes out of nowhere, sometimes the only symptom being a case of heartburn, which is regular for most people. Usually most of the victims of this are men, hence the name. Healthcare people have such a weird sense of humor...I didn't find that out until I started nursing school. My father never really believed in going to the doctor. He would cancel his dentist appointments because he "didn't feel up to it". Stubborn bastard. I loved him, and he was always too proud and humble to take care of himself. Something like heartburn could be fixed with Tums, and just like that he would be back to what he was doing.

This part is always very hard for me to explain. As a nursing student, it is difficult to explain to people why I have such a hard time looking at a Code Blue or giving someone chest compressions. My response to them is the same...I just have a hard time with seeing all of it and it is super stressful. I don't tell them the full story of how I had to flip over my 260 pound father and start chest compressions while my mother sat on the floor crying for him to wake up...the hardest part is, I thought he was coming back and just playing one of his jokes with us. It is so hard to have to explain how I am a competent nurse when I get flashbacks of my father lying on the ground flashing through my mind whenever I hear that sound on the hospital floor.

The question of competence in nurses always comes up. This is why situations like these are so hard for me. I don't want to tell someone of my past with PTSD and my ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression, because of losing my father. It has almost been 5 years of losing him, and why can my mind still not get over the one single event that changed my life forever? I cannot function without medication now...my mind ultimately winning the battle over my whole body. I cannot even feel autonomous when I am under the influence of a drug that is supposed to affect the way I feel about myself.

The reason why I am telling my gruesome story is NOT to say I have it worse that anyone else. My mission in life is to be an advocate. As a nursing student, I know that is difficult, especially with what I have been through. My goal is to work with families and patients that have gone through traumatic events like this. The hardest thing I went through when I lost my dad was how often people told me that they understood or know how hard it was. For me, grief and pain are individualized. That is what we learn in the healthcare setting. EVERYTHING, even the sheets you are lying on, is individual and personlized to you. The sort of pain that anyone goes through is personal to them. Therefore, you cannot know what they are going through. I want to be there for people that have gone through shitty things in their life and just hold them and have them talk while I listen. Because I cannot begin to understand what they are going through, I can use my human ability to listen and be there for them, no matter who they are or where they come from.

While working in a place like the ICU and MedSurg floors have put me through hell emotionally, I really do love learning about the patients that come into my life. I only wish one of those people could have been my father, but every step of the way I know he is looking down saying "Dammit, well he had the right idea". That is just Brian being his funny self. He was that way. That is what I love about him.

Whatever you have gone through, there is a place for you. There are millions that go through tragedy in their lives, from losing loved ones to homes to belongings and must proceed through their lives. The only terrible truth to that is that life goes on and you must continue with it. And you can. Because you are human and that is how you were created: to go on. As much as it hurts, as much as it kills you, as much as you just want to end it...you are much stronger than you think and your mind will play tricks on you. But your innate human ability to carry on will get you through and push you beyond what you believe you can do.

You are greatly loved. More than you know.

And although I don't have my dad, I have a wonderful family that has been through enough shit to obviously write a blog about. While this is just the first blog entry, there is so much more to come. Sadness is a common theme, but I hope you can relate in a sense and find some hope. Obviously I am still here, typing to anyone willing to sit down and read.

To Be Continued

*For Brian Bush, Dad 4/6/16 -- "It is what it is"