Before I Go

Oh, before I go - I must share that my dad gave us a bit of a scare this week. He had anticipated coming up to spend Tuesday night with us, but instead called at 8:00AM-ish to say he wouldn't make it. He didn't get me. In fact, I didn't even hear the phone! Winter break...hello? Does sleep ring a bell? But I digress - he left a message on our machine, which I got an hour or two (or three) later and he sounded terrible.

I wasn't super concerned, but I thought I'd better ring him and see what had happened. I was afraid that something had happened to someone in the family - Uncle Tony being my first guess. I called the house - no answer. I called his cell phone - right to voicemail. And I started to get a little more concerned. Not at home, cell is off. .

Actually, it probably doesn't sound like a big deal to a lot of people. Mike wouldn't have thought anything about it - but a couple of family tragedies will make you a little jumpy about stuff like that. You learn to dread any call that comes after 10pm and before 9am. You start to make associations - maybe they're at the hospital in an area where they're required to turn off cell phones.

So I decided to call Aunt Linda. Uncle Mike and Aunt Linda are, I figured, who (besides Jeff and myself) my dad would most likely call if something had happened. No answer at their house either. Now to my credit, I held it together pretty well. If it had been a year ago - just coming off my mom's death, I'd have panicked big time, called Mike and probably scared several years off of his life in the process. But I just sat back and watched tv with the phone next to me. Every 30-45 minutes or so I'd call my dad's house to see if he'd gotten home yet. I recognized that I'm a little irrational about this, but smart enough to also realize I wouldn't really relax until I talked to somebody. I think this is both because I lost my mom so suddenly and because she always tried to protect Jeff and I from worrying about her by not telling us about stuff until afterward. I didn't know she'd had heart surgery until it was a done deal. Anyway, it's enough to breed a certain amount of paranoia. But I'm digressing yet again.

Finally, my dad calls me back. Turns out he'd left the message right after he'd gotten home from the emergency room, before he went to bed. He hadn't heard the phone because he'd gone right to bed and slept through them. (Apparently sleep does ring a bell ;) ) He'd given himself food poisoning. My dad has become something of a crock pot chef since my mom died - and he put some chicken in the crock pot and left it all day to cook. It was supposed to be done about the time he got home from wherever he'd been that day. Running errands, I believe. Anyway, he got home to find out that the crock pot plug hadn't made a good connection with the outlet and instead of slow cooked chicken, he had no dinner. Irritated because it was too late to cook it at that point, he stuck it in the fridge and made himself some goulash. The next night, he took out the chicken and cooked it for dinner. The chicken that hadn't cooked in the crock pot. The raw chicken that had sat out at room temperature for eight hours. Yeah. Bad news. He'd become violently ill that night and ended up in the emergency room, where they hydrated him and gave him some medication.

The women I've told that story to have all responded with a variation of, "Dear God, the horror!" without needing an explanation of why that's bad. But, to a man like my dad - who has only been cooking for himself on a regular basis for about 14 months, it just wasn't something that occurred to him. I guarantee it will be something he thinks about from now on. He has suffered...Dear Lord, how he has suffered.

After I got off the phone with my dad and assured myself that he was alright...suffering and headed back to bed but alright...I called Mike. My husband, the health inspector, wanted to know if they had done a stool specimen test to determine what strain of bacteria he had been infected with. I was like, "Geez...I didn't ask and I am so totally not going to." He went on to give me a sort of science lesson about how it was probably salmonella or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I have no idea what else he was spouting off about...I was a literature major.

Anyway, Dad's feeling much better now, although he's not yet 100% after his ordeal. I asked him how long it would be before he ate chicken again. He sort of chuckled and said, "Probably a long time."