16 Feb 09 All the right things in a week of hell.
Two weeks ago today is when reality caught up with my family and myself. Two weeks ago my dad had a heart attack on board flight DL162 over the middle of Montana. The crew on board that plane is what saved his life. The flight was JFK bound but was instead diverted to Great Falls, MT.
Flight DL162 diverted to Great Falls, MT.
What came next were hours of getting the entire family out to Great Falls. After dropping everything at work I used my iPhone to find out he was in Great Falls, then did a Google search to look up hospitals in that area. In my favor, they only had one major hospital, which I called right when I got out of the car. By 3pm (plane landed in GTF at 2:02pm PST) I knew where he was and that they were taking care of him.
Made all the phone calls / flight arrangements while getting updates from the hospital which wasn’t forecasting a good recovery. By 6pm I had my brother driving from Pullman, WA in a rental (his car wouldn’t make it) from Hertz and 3 plane tickets ordered from Alaska Airlines with two hotel rooms at a local Marriott hotel.
By 11pm Mountain time (10pm Pacific) we were in Montana next to my Dad’s bed seeing him in probably the worst state I had ever seen.
Thankfully over the next few days he got better (faster then the hospital predicted) and we were once again reminded how lucky he was that he was at hospital (Benefis Healthcare) that is able to perform primary angioplasty.
On Thursday the media in Montana got wind of what was going on in their state and my dad was over the news. We also got to meet the entire staff that saved him.
The staff at Benefis.
By Friday he was allowed to go home and we took a Friday afternoon flight back to Seattle from Helena, MT.
I’m incredibly thankful for all the things that went right. Right flight crew, right doctor on board and an incredibly good hospital (all in the middle of Montana).
This experience also taught me how precious family is and that the time on this earth can be cut off at any moment but I’m glad to still have my Dad for what I hope is a lot more years.
Tags: family, iphone, life, technology, work
