My Wonderful Father

My dad passed away Sunday night at about 11pm. It was pretty unexpected. He had gone in last Tuesday for Gastric Bypass surgery which went really well according to his surgeon. He came home from the hospital on Thursday. We all knew going into that surgery that there was a chance he could die, but not a very big one--seeing as how his surgeon has done over a thousand of them and never made a mistake. When he came home we all assumed that that meant he would recover and he would be able to live a better life because of it. But on Saturday he started having extra pains and his wound began oozing green stuff. After the convincing of my mom, ex-bishop, and a nurse in my ward he finally agreed to let us take him to the hospital. By the time they got him to the ER he was completely unresponsive. The doctors at the ER were able to bring him around then and they said they had to get him into surgery right then or he would die and he nodded his consent. The repair surgery (to repair a hole in his intestines) went well, but the surgeon said that living through the surgery isn't the hard part. People usually die after this surgery because of pneumonia or heart failure. After the surgery he was given medication to paralyze and sedate him so that he wouldn't cough or anything that could mess up what they had done since they had to leave his wound open. Then it was just a balancing act--giving him different medications to help with blood pressure and other things and pushing fluids and trying to get the right amount of everything going in and out. At one point he was hooked up to twenty-three IVs with a whole lot of things also coming out of him. but eventually he slipped into a non-medication induced coma and then flat-lined. They worked to get his heart going again for twenty minutes but then we told them to stop. That was Sunday night.

But I know that it was the right time for him to go. I've felt really peaceful through this whole thing and through all the tears. He left on probably the greatest spiritual high of his life. In the past few weeks he has been through the temple with my two sisters who are going on missions, seen my brother married in the temple, and had the peace of knowing that my oldest sister is finally married to a very great guy. I don't think he'd ever been so happy. He was excited for the surgery too. He went into it knowing that if he was supposed to live, a drunk could do the surgery and it would be fine, or if he was supposed to die, he could have the best surgeon in the world do it and die. He wasn't able to do too much in his state of health prior to the surgery and he knew that if all went well he would be able to have a much better life and be a better father (not that he wasn't already awesome) and if it didn't he would be better in the spirit world where he could still help us--where he could go on the missions with my sisters and help all of the rest of us through life.