The Red Shirt

On Friday morning my dad texted my mom a message from work that was ultimately perplexing (yet rather uninformative): "really really sick can't drive go to room one hospital. send."

So she went to the hospital, but he wasn't here. When they saw the text she got, they started calling around but couldn't seem to locate him at any nearby hospitals. 

Finally he answered my mom's text asking for clarification to tell her more of his symptoms and that he had checked into a hotel room (at the hotel that he works at) so that he could sleep it off, but that he was too sick to even sleep, and that he would really like to go to the hospital. 

So my mom went to the hotel to pick him up to take him to the hospital.

His heart rate was off, so they gave him an EKG (because his heart is a going concern), but although his heart rate was off, they didn't seem to think his heart was the problem. So they gave him a CT scan (or CAT scan or something) and found that his gallbladder was severely inflamed and full of kidney stones and that it would have to come out immediately.

Now, my friend Shallee also had an emergency surgery for her gallbladder this weekend. She went in on Saturday and they held her overnight for an emergency surgery the following day. She went home Sunday afternoon.

They didn't wait at all for my dad, just pulled my dad into surgery immediately. Like, "Let's cut this guy open!" 

So he had surgery on Friday and has just been in a bad way since then. I was starting to get concerned about sepsis or something because his white blood cell count was elevated and didn't seem to be responding to the antibiotics they had been administering through his IV (his white blood cell count was 19000 on Friday when he was admitted and by Sunday it was only down to 18000 (normal is like 4000 (with anything over 10000 being concerning)). 

But today his white blood cell count is "borderline" and he's feeling...better...though he still hasn't managed to keep any food down at all (so that's still an issue). 

He has been up for texting and things, though, which he hadn't been all weekend, so I thought it would be a good time to do a 16th anniversary of the red shirt he gifted Rachel when she was a wee baby, shortly before he went in for an emergency triple bypass surgery. 

I can't even remember what size it was meant to be, but all of my kids have worn it around age two (anywhere from 12 months to 4 years, honestly). 

Here's Phoebe wearing it tonight, with all of her siblings who wore it before her:

Phoebe and the red shirt July 2023

Three years ago I did a 13th anniversary post of the shirt, which included this lovely picture of Alexander wearing it:

Alexander and the red shirt September 2020

Here's a little peek of Zoë wearing the shirt one of our very last nights in Durham (when she and Benjamin were playing "carry our babies around in paper bowls"):

Zoë and the red shirt, July 2017

I have a few pictures of Benjamin in the shirt for you to enjoy. For example, here he is running away from the hair dryer while Miriam patiently waits for a haircut (I loved, loved, loved her long hair):

Benjamin and the red shirt August 2015

And here he is a few months before that in May 2015 when Zoë was just brand new (you can't really tell that he's wearing the shirt, but I know that he is):

Zoë was really questioning my parenting here...

Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate a picture of Miriam wearing it. We are positive that she did wear it, but I am less positive that we have a picture of her wearing it. The thing about Miriam at that age was that (1) she was very good about going to bed, so she didn't often linger around at night in her pyjamas, and (2) she loved getting dressed (often in 3, 4, or 5 dresses all at once) and would be sure to emerge from her room in the morning completely dolled up (that is, she wasn't one to linger in her pyjamas in the morning, either). So I don't have many pictures of her in pyjamas at all.

Fluffy dresses? 10,000 pictures. 

Pyjamas? A few dozen.

And she was such a fashionista that if she knew we would be hanging out in our pyjamas for any reason (like New Year's Eve, for example), she would be sure to reserve her newest, fanciest, matching-est set of pyjamas for the occassion.

And that's just how she was as a toddler. So...I'm honestly not sure I have a picture of her in this shirt.

We'll have to take a picture of her wearing it later. We joked about taking a picture of her in it this evening (she was helping me scroll through thumbnails of our thousands of pictures, trying to spot the red shirt), but then I remember that Phoebe (who is blessedly asleep) is currently wearing it. 

So, later.

But here's a picture of Rachel wearing it as a bigger kid:

Rachel and the red shirt, July 2011

And here she is wearing it for the first time in early September 2007 (at six weeks old) to cheer up my dad, who was in the hospital recovering from heart surgery:

Rachel and the red shirt, September 2007

We're glad Bumpa is feeling (at least a bit) better. And it will sure be interesting to see how many more washes this red shirt has in it!