John Evans shares about how his family helped with his recovery from surgery.
A week after my open-heart surgery, I ended up back in the hospital because I was struggling to breathe. I felt it on the stairs, moving from room to room, and at night as I tried to sleep propped up on pillows.
One afternoon, I was doing my short recovery walk to the end of the street when I burst into tears and called a friend. “I can’t handle the pain,” I told him. “You can,” he said. “You will.” I turned around, made it back to the house, and started crying again at the front door.
My parents were in town from Florida, helping me with my three boys while I recovered. My dad looked at me and said, “Do you want me to call the surgeon?” I was forty-six years old. I had children of my own. But in that moment, I was just his son. I nodded yes. Back at the hospital, doctors found fluid around my lungs and put drainage tubes in my chest. It hurt, but after a while, I could breathe again. I don’t remember much else clearly from those sixteen days in the hospital.
Friends stopped by with flowers, cookies and kind notes. My oldest son visited me in the ICU and hated seeing me hooked up to so many machines. His younger brothers came later, once a hospital gown could hide the tubes. But what I remember most is my father sitting in a small chair in the corner of the room. He stayed there while I slept. When I woke, he talked with me about Stanford’s run in March Madness.