Intro to Creative Writing
Professor Harrell
4/18/18
Unit Three
My Biggest Fan
My father was my biggest fan. He was the first one to support me when it came to my music. I would go to the studio and he would be the first one to check on me. He would ask how things were going, and if I needed anything. He was also the only one who stayed with me late enough to shut the lights off when I was done. When my music attracted record companies, my father was the one who sat next to me to read the offers I was given. Me being young and impatient, I wanted to sign the first deal I was given, but he didn’t let me. He didn’t allow me to get blinded by the deceiving offers. My father and I were inseparable. Every day when he would get home from work, he would rush to the studio to meet me there. I never saw my dad happier than when he would listen to my music over the huge studio speakers. He was my biggest fan.
My father was a diabetic. One big problem faced was having a low blood sugar. This would cause him to have sugar attacks. These attacks were a scary thing to witness growing up as his son. I would see them first hand. His eyes would roll back and he would become unresponsive. The first attack I remember him having was when I was in middle school. I came home from school to my brother kneeling over my father who was laying on the ground. He must’ve fell because they were in the kitchen. My brother Mark was continuously slapping him and trying to get him to drink orange juice from the straw he was shoving in his mouth. I was terrified. Thoughts of my father dyeing ran through my head. Thankfully he pulled through within minutes and he was back to normal. He was my biggest fan. When someone suffers from low blood sugar and has an attack, you need to introduce sugar to their body fast to raise their sugar level. I didn’t know this. We would usually use orange juice and sometimes jelly, they were his favorite. After a while, I got used to these attacks. They didn’t affect me like they did when I was a little kid. In my mind, I began to instantly believe he would pull through every attack and return to normal. Until I received a call from my mother one day.
She called my cell phone from downstairs. When I picked up the phone, the first thing my mother said to me was “Dom, can you and Mark come help me? I think Daddy’s having a sugar attack”. Then I did something I’m ashamed of. I didn’t rush as if his life depended on it. My brother and I didn’t walk slow, but we also didn’t run as fast as we should’ve.
When we got downstairs we heard my mother shouting at my father. “Mark! You have to drink the orange juice! Mark!”. From her tone of voice, I knew my father wasn’t in the best condition before I even saw him. When we got to the living room we saw my father laying on the couch. He was drenched in sweat and his eyes were slightly open. This is when we stepped in to assist my mother and told her to call 911. Instead of the orange juice that my father couldn’t drink, we decided to get jelly. I ran to the fridge and grabbed the jar of welches grape jelly. I didn’t bother with cleanliness, I had to stick my fingers into the jar and get them covered in jelly. I ran back to my father so I could rub the jelly in his mouth around his gums. Even if he didn’t swallow it, his mouth would still digest some of the sugar. Food doesn’t always have to be swallowed. As I tried to rub the jelly on his gums, he wouldn’t let me in. This was when he started to groan.
I will never forget the sound he was making. I could tell that he was in pain from his long drawn out mumbling groan, but since his body was in shut down mode from the sugar attack, he couldn’t put his all into showing us he was in pain. This had never happened before. Usually when my father had sugar attacks, we gave him some sugar and ten minutes later he was good to go. Not this time. The next part is the part that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
My father stopped breathing. While we were fighting him to get the jelly in his mouth, things got real silent. I looked at his chest and it wasn’t moving. I placed my ear to his mouth and couldn’t hear any breathing. As soon as I noticed this, I shouted that he wasn’t breathing and we needed to drag him onto the floor so we could perform CPR.
I began to do chest compressions on my father. I could not believe the situation we were in. After my thirty chest compressions, I hesitated to give him mouth to mouth. I had to get my brother to do it. I wasted valuable because I hesitated. This makes me sick every time I think about it. I was trained in CPR, and when it came to doing it correctly, I failed. After my brother gave him two breathes, we heard him groan again. As soon as we heard that, we stopped the CPR.
The ambulance still didn’t arrive. It felt like this had been going on for an hour, but in reality it was more like three minutes. While we waited for the ambulance and tryed to talk to my dad, we noticed he stopped breathing. We began to give him CPR again. Soon after I resumed the compressions, I felt a snap. I broke my father’s rib. I told my brother I broke his rib and he told me to continue. Until the ambulance got there, my brother and I were my father’s only hope for survival.
Finally, the ambulance arrived in what felt like three hours later. The paramedics stormed into our house asking where my father was. I directed them straight to him. This is when they asked us nicely to wait in the other room.
My mom, brother, and I went and sat down in our front room. My mom was a mess. She couldn’t sit still, and all she wanted to do was talk to my father, but that wasn’t possible at the time. One of the EMTs urged that she stayed in the room with my brother and I. When we finally got my mother to sit down, we started to hear some type of machine turn on and continue to run. I didn’t know what it was until I saw them wheeling my father out of the house. This machine was a chest compression machine. It was a huge hunk of metal on my father’s chest. It was around his back for stability. This thing showed no mercy. It pumped, and pumped, and pumped. I couldn’t look away as they wheeled my father into the back of the ambulance. They told us they were taking him to cooper hospital which is right down the street from us.
After receiving that information, I had to make a call. Unfortunately, my sister was working at her hospital that night so she wasn’t with us. I had to call her. As soon as she picked up and heard my voice, she could tell something was wrong. I told her that we thought it was a sugar attack, but it turned out to be much more than that. She immediately broke down and started crying to me. “Is he okay?! Did they say he will be fine?! Where are they taking him?”. My sister was in the middle of her hospital hallways crying to me on the phone. She told me she was leaving work and she will meet us at the hospital.
When we got to the hospital, we were ushered into a small room. There was nothing on the walls, no outlets, and three depression half-padded chairs. This room aloud us all to sit in silence. My whole family was thinking their own thoughts. I was thinking about my music. I was thinking that if my father doesn’t survive this, how will I continue to be creative? He always pushed me to keep going when I wanted to give up. What is an artist without their number one fan?
Soon enough, my thoughts were interrupted by the doctor. He opened the door, walked in, and shut the door behind him. He apologized and told us my father didn’t make it. He said we could go see him in the back if we wanted to. Everyone went except me. I didn’t want to see my dead father. I didn’t want to see him with tubes down his throat. Loneliness is what I wanted. I needed to start to deal with the fact that I just lost my biggest fan, and I will never have another one.