Why couldn't it have been more obvious..?

Channel:

Sean Gill

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28

Published on February 11, 2021 8:56:38 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxxzBknAyCc

Duration: 17:46

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This is the final proper conversation I had with my dad, at about 5am, just 13 hours before he suffered a pulmonary embolism and died in my arms.

To anybody out there who has parents, friends and loved ones who may be at higher risk of forming life-threatening blood-clots because of a sedentary locked-down lifestyle:

Take extra care to make sure that you and the people around you stay active. Take turns shopping, invite friends and family out on regular walks.

It's a good thing to be protective of vulnerable members of your household, but you must also remember that over-protection can be just as detrimental to their well-being.

Now more than ever we have to be proactive in raising awareness of the dangers of blood clots and other inactivity-related related conditions of life threatening nature.

My Dad believed he had only pulled a muscle and he never sought medical treatment.

My Dad already had hereditary water retention which would cause swelling in his legs, through living nearly 20 years of his life sat down in front of a computer. It had reached a point where he was told that he would likely not live more than a decade if he did not change his lifestyle.

The doctors said he had the legs of a 90 year old man and that not only was water pooling in his legs, but his capillaries were also leaking. Causing blood to pool also. Making his legs red and blotchy for a number of years.

So when the signs presented themselves to him, and to me, we didn't either of us take them seriously. It just seemed like more problems for him to add to the list to get checked out when he graduated from university in a couple of months and no longer had to pay for prescriptions as a Student.

Even up till the point he dropped dead from lack of oxygen supply, I believed that he would be OK. And even then as I tried to administer CPR, I never once lost faith that the mountain of strength I had come to lean on would be too stubborn to go out so easily.

It wasn't until the moment which I was approached by one of the paramedics and they started giving me the speech you hear in all the hollywood movies when somebody isn't going to make it.

"Hi, My name is Chris. You probably won't remember my name..."

Ironically that is the part of the speech I remember most. That and the part which he told me that my father only had 2 minutes left to show signs of life before they had to officially declare him dead.

I thought about going upstairs and screaming at him in an anime-esque fashion in the hopes that it would somehow stir the light from behind his eyes but I already knew that it had been long enough for the majority of brain death to have occurred already.

The paramedics arrived 10 minutes after he died and the process took more than 10 minutes. A full 20 minutes + of being dead is a pretty big scientific certainty that brain death had happened fully. Also I figured I'd already done enough screaming while administering CPR and it clearly had no effect.

I have 2 reasons for uploading this. Firstly I want people to see how normal somebody who is suffering from a life-threatening condition can seem, in order for people to learn from mine and his mistake of not being able to catch it in time.

The other reason I'm uploading this is because I never want to lose any piece of my father that still exists. If my PC blew up tomorrow I'd lose this and so many more snippets of daily life I accidentally captured with him. I will likely upload any and all content featuring my father in future. Even though most of it is probably me telling him to stop distracting me from games.

Certainly wish he was here to distract me from them now though. Bloody irony or tragedy... IDK you decide.