So I had this dream once..

[ScruU2wice]

And in this dream I'm with my dad and everything is perfectly fine, but suddenly he collapses and starts drooling uncontrollably. the most vivid thing I remember is the spitting and the helplessness of my father. I woke up scared out of my mind.

Fast forward a month, to when my mom is telling me how she has a dream where my dad falls in water and he's drowning, but my mom pulls him out.

Fast forward to late tuesday night. I'm sitting upstairs in my room watching TV when I here my dad scream my name from downstairs. I rush downstairs where my dad is rubbing his chest and telling me to call 911 because he thinks he is having a heart attack. I do so and try to calm my hysteric mother down, who only seems to agitating my father more by panicing. My dad keeps gasping and struggling to say that he can't breathe. On the phone with the 911 operator I ask desperatly what I should do. among finding any comfortable position and not to touch, she told me to let him spit out whatever he needed to. As soon as he started to do this it reminded me of the nightmare I had.

The paramedics came minutes later and took him to the hospital. My mom had called our neighbor to tell him what had just happened and he came rushing over. He took us to the ER since neither my mom nor I were in any state to drive. There we stayed in the waiting room while they ran tests on my sedated Father.

My mother was stuck in the strange moment before breaking out in tears for the whole time. My 9 year old brother slowly started admiting that he was starving, so I asked the chaplin who had been roaming the halls of the hospital consoling whomever he could find, to take us to a snack bar. I bought a donut for me and my brother and we headed back to the ER.

When we got there, I saw my mom weeping as the doctor just finished talking to her. I came up to her and asked what he said but she couldn't bring herself together to tell me, so I asked the neighbor that had accompanied us. He told me that my father had lung cancer.

I consoled my mom and told her everything would be alright, and that god was with us. I wasn't crying, I almost wanted to show some emotion but I didn't. I just kept thinking that I would wake up and this would all just be another dream.

The doctor came back and told us that he didn't know what exactly caused the accute lack of breathing for my dad but he was sure that it involved the cancer that had spread throug both of my fathers lungs. He asked if my dad was a smoker, and we had to admit he was. I asked him if there was a chance it wasn't cancer, but he replied that he was sure it was.

We left for home after a few ours after my father was stabilized. my brother fell asleep soundly but I couldn't close my eyes for more than an hour. My mom got on the phone with every relative we knew here, and called every relative in Pakistan. She told them to pray for us. In our culture pray for us doesn't have a hollow meaning.

I prayed, too. I asked God to spare my father and us. I asked Him to please not let my father be as sick as everyone says he is. I prayed with all my heart and a complete faith. You may say it was coincedence or come up with some logic to it, but God heard my and my families prayers and he spared my dad.

The thing that had brought so much stress on to my dad was the fact that he ran a resturaunt 9am to 10pm everyday since it opened like 4 weeks ago. Now we had to run the store and step a mile in his shoes. So with no experience and very little knowledge of how the store actually ran we opened up the store and got help from all the people who were working there. So for the past week I've been basically been running a quiznos.

After a week in intensive care they finally got my father breathing on his own. The doctor came and told us that it was infact not cancer but sever case of nemeunia that had infected my fathers lungs and crippled his breathing. My dad though decided that he was quitting smoking and I decided that I was never going to pick it up.

It was going ok for a week, but It's been getting hard since school started and I have 5 AP classes I'm taking.

[FartinMowler]

I like the meatball sub. Don't eat spicy food before you go to bed.

[ThisIsWitty]

I like how the doctors were 'sure it was cancer', then it wasn't anymore. Medical science sure is funny like that.

[MLE]

i like how in the middle of your heartfelt story, you take cheap shots at other cultures.

Originally Posted by ScruU2wice

In our culture pray for us doesn't have a hollow meaning.

[FS]

I had a dream once where the godless heathens burned in righteous agony, and when I woke up my pillow was gone.

[FartinMowler]

i like how in the middle of your heartfelt story, you take cheap shots at other cultures.

[AChimp]

I had a dream where all the smokers died of lung cancer and that I prayed for them to rot in Hell. And they did.

[executioneer]

i had a dream once where i was Captain Kirk and i had sex w/ an active volcano

[Sethomas]

I like how this sad story became one of the greatest lol fests as of late.

[Jixby Phillips]

Originally Posted by AChimp

I had a dream where all the smokers died of lung cancer and that I prayed for them to rot in Hell. And they did.

Yeah smoking sucks!

I'm glad your dad doesn't have cancer, Scru.

[Anonymous]

Ditto. My dad was having the beginning stages of a heart attack over a year ago and I was really worried :< He got a balloon angioplasty. ;<

[AChimp]

Eh, that doctor sounds like a moron. You don't look at a patient for a little while in the ER, conclude that they must have lung cancer based on the handful of tests you've done, ask the family if the guy was a smoker, and upon having your suspicions confirmed, saying "Yup. He has teh cancar."

Guess what. You don't suddenly "have trouble breathing" when lung cancer has "spread through both your lungs." It's a slow, debilitating process and your father would have been flat on his back weeks earlier. Nobody has woken up one day to suddenly discover that they have developed terminal cancer overnight throughout a major organ without experiencing some painful symptoms beforehand.

Pneumonia shows up as giant cloudy spots in x-rays, and it can appear literally within hours. I saw my x-rays last year when I had pneumonia. What a coincidence that lung cancer appears similar.

Hooray to God for crappy doctors that jump the gun!

[Sethomas]

I understand your logic, but it's not flawless. My grandfather was lung cancer waiting to happen; smoked cigarettes since age twelve, inhaled cigars for the past thirty years. Around age 65 he never ever missed a day of work, then one day he was in perfect health through the day then hit by a strong case of pneumonia-like symptoms at night, including attacks of asphyxiation. Dead within three months.

So no, unless you first develop emphysema or however it's spelled, lung cancer is seldom predicated.

[AChimp]

I've had a couple uncles die of lung cancer, and my neighbour died of it a few years ago. Long, painful slow process of sitting around and waiting to die and wishing that you hadn't smoked an entire tin every two days. Actually, one of those uncles technically died of a stroke BEFORE the cancer got him (good ol' genetics kicked in first).

My point is that it's highly irresponsible of the doctor to play the cancer card with 100% certainty in the amount of time it takes to buy a donut, especially when there are a host of OTHER things that come first in the diagnosis hierarchy. How about running a few simple cultures on the sputum? D'oh!

Instead it's, "Hullo! Highly impressionable religious family at twelve o'clock! What sounds really gross and fatal?"

[Sethomas]

If you refer to cigarettes as coming in "tins", you deserve cancer.
USA!!!USA!!!USA!!!

[AChimp]

When I refer to smoking a tin, I am referring to loose tobacco coming in one of these:



It's the ONLY way to buy the stuff and at least look respectable, IMO.

[Sethomas]

Bah. I buy my tobacco from large cookie jars, and I keep it in a special pouch. Then I smoke it out of MY PIPE, which is made of WOOD.

Talk to me about respectable smoking.

[AChimp]

Bah! I come from a country where this is what's considered respectable:



Our forefathers could roll a cigar with the toes on one foot. The other foot had no toes because of frostbite.

[kahljorn]

"Talk to me about respectable smoking. "

I do believe you meant

[Sethomas]

And it is manifest that you meant

[AChimp]

This thread is so much better now.

[ScruU2wice]

Originally Posted by MLE

i like how in the middle of your heartfelt story, you take cheap shots at other cultures.

I like how in the middle of my heartfelt thread you nit pick at words i choose and think I'm making a "cheap shot" at other cultures. I don't even feel like describing what prayer means to me, because of course you can pull out more of my bad use of words. If you think I really gave a rats ass who's culture I might have offended when I thought my father was lying in intensive care with malignant cancer, than feel free to pull out more things you like about my story.

[The Retro Kat]

I love you Saad. Big kisses and hugs when i see you again.

[Zomboid]

See? That's why I use chewing tobacco and don't smoke anything more than cigars every now and then (unless you count weed). Yeah, I could get gum cancer, but I can still run and shit without hacking up phlegm.

[Dole]

I had a dream the other night that I was watching a Jerry Springer type show, and the title of the show at the bottom of the screen was: 'I bit a dolphin - does it matter?'