Touch You Last

It's Sarah once again... We're 96 hours past the stroke and my Aunt is still stable. She's effectively off the respirator and she is coming out of the drug-induced coma. The hospital staff think that she'll be awake within the next 24 hours. Once she is, we will be better able to determine how bad it is and what the next steps are. We are very hopeful, though. She is doing well, all things considered. It will likely be a long, hard road ahead, but she's a tough lady. She can do it. As for the family, we're holding up pretty well too. We will be at the hospital all weekend, so we won't be updating again for a while. I promise that we'll update once we're back. Thanks, everyone, for all your support. You guys are keepers!

It's Sarah here... We didn't imagine a call from Sally (who just had a baby and whose birthday is today), telling us that something was really wrong with my Aunt Flo. And that the hospital said that family should get to Kingston ASAP. We hadn't foreseen a panicked drive through pea soup fog to KGH, meeting my parents at Emergency. We didn't predict sitting in the OR waiting room while she underwent emergency neurosurgery for over 4 hours. We couldn't have predicted waiting outside the ICU until 3:30 a.m. to catch a glimpse of my 47-year old aunt hooked up to a ventilator while in a drug-induced coma. We never imagined asking Uncle Serge to call Aunt Pat while on March Break with the family, having to tell her that they'd have to come back first thing in the morning. We never wanted to entertain thoughts about 'making the call' about the life of someone we love. The neurosurgeon (one of the top in Eastern Ontario) couldn't identify what was wrong; we...

McLeans are copycats; I mentioned this way back . We bought a dog because my uncle and aunt got a dog. We already lived on the same street, and my uncle and aunt were also Dad’s brother and Mom’s sister, but just to make things all the more familiar, we both got dogs from the same litter. Bandit was the runt, the last one not yet sold, and when we went to check him out he fell asleep in my brother’s arms. There was never really a question that we’d take him home. I honestly don’t know who came up with the name Bandit. I think ‘Gizmo’ was the only other real contender. If my brother and I had our way, he would have been either Axel or Slash. This is why you don’t let your kid name things. Case in point: Bandit’s brother, named by my cousins, was called Booger. I’m trying to think about the strongest memories I have of him, but I can only really think of his traits in general. He was loud for a little dog. Back when his sight was still good and he wasn’t totally deaf, it took him about a...

Got a call from my parents saying that they had to put the family dog down. Bandit was seventeen, and he lived far longer than anyone would have imagined, so it could have been much worse. Still, if you've had a pet who died or if you have imagination of any kind, you know that it still sucks. I think what bothers me the most is that I wasn't there. Not because I wanted to see him one last time--he looked a little bit worse every time I came home. It's that I wish my parents hadn't had to deal with it alone. You have kids, the kids drive you nuts about buying them a dog, you give in, the kids leave home, the dog gets old, then you're the one who has to put it down. So it goes. I'll write more on Bandit this weekend. Happier stuff, I promise; the kind of stories you break out at a wake. But for now--for those of you who knew him--I just thought you should know.