“This is so weird,” Moe said in surprise one afternoon. “Everything has gone black in my left eye.”
“What?”
“Everything is black in one eye,” he repeated quizzically. “It's really strange.”
We were sitting in lawn chairs on the hill beside our cabin. It was our favorite place to relax on a summer afternoon. Sitting there we could see for miles and miles, over the top of grandpa Russell's cabin, over the garden and orchard in front of it, over the trees lining the creek beyond, over the forest, all the way to the distant purple blue mountains and Fisherman's Point, outlined against puffy cumulus clouds building up distance.
I looked at Moe in concern, but he didn't seem to be worried.
“Bizarre!,” he exclaimed a few moments later. “Now it's like someone is slowly lowering a piece of black paper in front of that eye.”
“Are you feeling OK?” I asked in alarm.
“Yeah, I feel fine,” he told me. “And now my sight is back to normal. That was so strange!”
“Strange, nothing!” I thought, but Moe seemed to have enjoyed the moment, and wouldn't take me seriously when I suggested he needed to see a doctor.
We were spending a week in the mountains with the kids. I was having a ball, redecorating the cabin. A few weeks earlier my younger sister, Linda, had brought her Young Women's class to the cabin and repainted the front room for a service project. Now I was finishing the job, painting the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, then putting up sayings over the doors and painting a scene in the tiny bathroom.
Above the door in the kitchen I painted, “Act Enthusiastic and You'll Be Enthusiastic”, dad's all time favorite saying. Over the door in the bedroom I painted “Most of the Work in the World is Done By People Who Don't Feel Good”, something Mom always used to say. On the door in the bathroom I painted “If You Look For The Bad In Mankind, Expecting To Find It, You Surely Will”, my favorite quote. Then on the wall next to the toilet I painted a tree, an old fashioned outhouse, and some flowers. I thought it turned out really cute.
I was so busy redecorating that I forgot all about Moe's eye, until a few weeks later, when it went blind for fifteen minutes. That really worried me, but he just thought it was kind of cool and weird.
Four days later it went half-way blind again, and I got scared.
“You have got to go in to the doctor's and see what's going on,” I told him determinedly, but he still wouldn't listen to me.
“Maybe when I get back from Oregon,” he finally agreed, “but I don't have time to go before then.”
Moe had been invited to attend a special program at his old high school in Pendelton, Oregon, inducting his football team into the town's Hall of Fame. He had been looking forward to the trip for weeks, and he wasn't about to let anything stop him.
He flew to Oregon the next day, had a great time, and came home that weekend. The following Monday he came home from work early.
“What are you doing home?” I asked in surprise when he walked in the back door. Moe's face was kind of pale, and he didn't look very good.
“I think maybe I should go to the doctors,” he told me slowly.
“What's the matter?”
“I can't seem to put my words together right. I was trying to tell people what to do at work, but I couldn't say it.”
This time Moe didn't look like he was enjoying himself. In fact, he looked kind of scared. Quickly I called our family doctor and asked if I could bring Moe in, then I got him in the car and we drove to his office. As soon as he heard what was happening he sent us to the emergency room. There, they confirmed my worst fears.
“Your husband is experiencing stroke symptoms,” the doctor told me. “We'll run a test, but he probably has a blocked carotid artery.
Sure enough, the test showed his artery was almost totally blocked. Apparently small pieces of plaque had been breaking off over the past few weeks, traveling up to his brain and causing the momentary blindness in his left eye. They called them TIA's or mini strokes, and he'd had something like seven of them.
“It's a miracle your husband hasn't had a massive stroke,” the doctor told me once the tests were complete. “We'll do surgery tomorrow.”
That was a scary night for me. I spent most of the evening on the phone, calling Moe's sons, brother and sister, and parents, then my family, letting them know about his surgery.
The next day I spent waiting. First I waited with Moe in pre-op, which seemed to take forever, then I waited while he was in surgery. His doctor finally came out and told me that the surgery went well and everything looked good, so I could relax, but then I sat outside the recovery room for hours, waiting while for him to come out of sedation and then for a room to become available so they could move him into ICU . It was late in the evening before he finally was settled into his own room, but the nurse on duty told me it was past visiting hours and I couldn't go in to see him. I've got to tell you, I was almost on the verge of tears by then. It had been a long, long day, and I didn't know what to do. Thank goodness another nurse came on duty about then, and she was more understanding and let me go in to at least tell Moe goodnight. He was sleepy, and a little loopy, but in good spirits, so I didn't feel bad about leaving him to go home and check on the kids.
They let me take Moe home from the hospital the next afternoon. I was really surprised, but he seemed to be doing great.
“It hurt more to have my tooth pulled than this surgery,” he told me happily when I walked into his room that morning. “I haven't been sick at all.”
I could tell by his coloring that he was doing much better. And also by the way he was joking around with the nurses and doctors, and eating his breakfast. He hadn't felt sick before he came to the hospital, and the surgery hadn't bothered him. “It's been a lot like having a vacation,” he told me with a gleam in his eye. “This is an expensive kind of hotel, but it's been fun.”
“Yeah, right,” I thought, a little irritated that he was having such a good time while I'd been sick with worry, but I sure was glad everything was going to be OK.
The whole seriousness of the situation didn't really hit Moe until a week or two later, when he went back in to his cardiologist for a check up.
“You are one lucky man,” the doctor told him then. “Your artery was more than 95% blocked, and you were a walking time bomb, just waiting to go off. The only thing I can say is it just must not have been your time to go, because you should have been dead.”
That sobered Moe up. He looked at the doctor for a few seconds, then nodded his head.
“I guess I am lucky,” he said. “Thank goodness it wasn't my time yet. If I can just have another thirteen years, so I can be here until my girls can grow up and get married, I'll be happy.”
That was eight years ago this September. So far, so good. Kamala will graduate from High School in a couple of weeks, and Krisann will graduate next year. Thank goodness the Lord decided to give Moe this extra time., and hopefully he's still got a lot left to go.
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