Pepsi

My dad loves his Pepsi. He takes medication for high blood pressure so that he can continue to drink Pepsi. If he didn’t drink Pepsi, his blood pressure would probably be fine but, well, he’s 81 years old, let the man have his Pepsi, right?

One recent Tuesday (because of course it was Tuesday…”Dawn’s in trouble, it must be Tuesday.”) I checked my phone around 3:10. I usually leave my phone in my purse, which is then in a file cabinet drawer all day. But that Tuesday, I checked my phone because I wanted to see if Lyss had texted me anything about that evening’s track meet. It was the first of the season.

I didn’t have anything from Alyssa but I did have a text from my sister. She was letting me and our brother know that she’d called an ambulance for our dad that morning around 11:30 because he’d fallen several times in the past few days.

Okay. I told the lovely ladies I work with and they all encouraged me to leave and go see my dad since he was in the hospital that is only about two miles from where I work.

When I got to the hospital, he was still in the emergency room. He’d received two bags of fluids, finally peed and they were actually going to release him to go home in the next half hour or so.

How fortuitous. I texted my siblings and let them know I’d take him home.

The doctor came in and talked to me and Dad.

Wait, let’s back up. As soon as I arrived, my dad informed me that he thought his problems were from his Covid vaccine. See, he’d received his first shot the previous Friday. And his weakness and falls had begun happening after receiving the shot.

So. The doctor agreed that the weakness and loss of appetite could very well be from the vaccine, then he quickly pointed out, “But don’t take that to mean you shouldn’t get your second shot. You need to get that second shot. Just be sure to hydrate before and after. And by hydrate, I mean drink a lot. Even if what you’re drinking is Pepsi, you need to drink as much as you can before the shot and after. Even if you don’t feel like it.”

See, the official diagnosis was severe dehydration. My dad said that after he got his shot, he hadn’t been hungry or thirsty and so hadn’t eaten in three days.

Guys, my dad is a frail man. He can’t afford to not eat for three days. He probably weighs, at most, 150 pounds. He’s small and so even a day without food and Pepsi will take a toll on him.

While I was waiting for the nurses to finish the discharge paperwork, my brother called me. He offered to come to the hospital (he lives about a mile away) and take Dad home to Sister’s house since I needed to be in the next town away for Lyss’s track meet.

Can I tell you how refreshing it was to have a DUDE offer something like that? I didn’t even have to ASK! Women all over the world know what I’m talking about here. We do so much emotional work for the men in our lives and so it was refreshing to have the dudest of dudes offer something like that.

I felt very much like my siblings and I handled this incident like a well- oiled machine. Our teamwork was pretty stellar.