I was sitting with my small group in Shores Chapel last week when I got a text message from my mom. \u201cJust got a call that Uncle Spencer has had a stroke,\u201d Mom said. \u201cThey are at Unity and transporting him to LR.\u201d<\/p>\n
Praise God my uncle is OK, but he will have a long road to recovery. He\u2019s back here in Searcy for recovery and rehabilitation, much to the relief of our family members. If they had refused to send him back this way, I\u2019m convinced he would\u2019ve come on his own, kicking and screaming.<\/p>\n
My uncle\u2019s stroke wasn\u2019t the first cardiac blip on our family\u2019s radar this month. The week before last, my grandmother had an appointment with her cardiologist after her heart check-up came back irregular. We found out in her follow-up appointment that the test just had a bad read. Her heart is healthy and clear, but the prospect of a failing heart had my own skipping a beat for several days.<\/p>\n
Family health has been on my mind quite a lot lately, and rightfully so, considering the series of unfortunate events that have plagued us. Both sides of my family are riddled with heart problems; we have blockages, heart attacks, strokes, irregular heart beats and A-FIB. We\u2019d have XYZ-FIB if it was a thing. My search history is stacked with health-related Google searches like \u201cwhen is it too early to have regular cardiologist visits?\u201d<\/p>\n
I told my mom last week that between our family\u2019s poor heart health and the stress that this job can sometimes cause, I\u2019m a ticking time bomb. They should\u2019ve had me at the emergency room yesterday. Partly serious but mostly joking, I think I was in a comedic stage of coping and stress management.<\/p>\n
My family\u2019s health has had me wondering about my own heart. What preventative measures should I take to keep my heart healthy? And what preventative measures should I take to keep my heart from breaking in two?<\/p>\n
The day after my uncle\u2019s stroke and a week removed from my grandmother\u2019s heart scare, I sat in the driver\u2019s seat of a Harding van, driving a group of Bison staff members to a conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The eight-hour drive was donned with gray skies and midwestern scenics \u2014 perfect weather for Deep-Thinking and Reflection™. Then, earlier this week, I sat on the Midnight Oil patio, typed away at a news story \u2014 Dawes\u2019s \u201cAll Your Favorite Bands\u201d playing in my headphones \u2014 and watched yellow-red-orange-brown leaves fall from the surrounding trees.<\/p>\n
A lot was, and is, on my mind: my family\u2019s health and my senior-year increasing list of lasts. My Gmail tab was open to a GRE score report, which I was glaring at for too long, wondering what steps I must take to increase my scores if graduate school is something I\u2019m seriously interested in.<\/p>\n
When I asked the barista to surprise me with a hot coffee drink, I didn\u2019t expect he\u2019d pour me a cappuccino with one too many sprinkles of nostalgia and introspection, but that\u2019s where I found myself.<\/p>\n
It occured to me that we get used to the leaves on the Midnight Oil trees being green, and then when they start to turn yellow-red-orange-brown like they have been, we\u2019re surprised.<\/p>\n
We get used to there always being a next year \u2014 next year\u2019s Club Week, next year\u2019s newspaper deadline, next year\u2019s staff trip to Somewhere Cool, USA \u2014 and then when there\u2019s not a next year, we\u2019re surprised.<\/p>\n
We get used to our older relatives always being happy and healthy \u2014 throwing the baseball around with you in the backyard, cracking a joke at the family holiday gathering, keeping up with the youngest relatives who sprint around the house with ease \u2014 and then when they\u2019re not able to keep up any longer, we\u2019re surprised.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know a whole lot about anything right now (if you know where I\u2019ll be this time next year, send me an email, please), but as the leaves are changing from green to yellow-red-orange-brown, so are a lot of other things in my life \u2014 and in my friends\u2019 lives, in my family\u2019s life and yours, too. I don\u2019t know a lot, but I know that I\u2019d like the leaves to be green for just a little bit longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was sitting with my small group in Shores Chapel last week when I got a text message from my mom. \u201cJust got a call that Uncle Spencer has had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14705,"featured_media":11115,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-opinions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11927,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11926\/revisions\/11927"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}