My Family's Struggle, 1998, by Zach Staszewski
From MemoryArchive
Who: Zach Staszewski What: My Family's Struggle When: 1998 Where: Wisconsin
My family (my mom, dad, sister, and me) always struggled with being overweight. I never really saw it as a problem. Of course I was uncomfortable at pools or at school when the "mean" kids would make fat jokes, but my family was always that way and it never phased me much. I always wished to be skinny, but I just loved food too much. A little too much. I didn't ever eat horribly; I would always eat my fruits and vegetables and I never complained much about what I had to eat. The problem came in with HOW MUCH I ate. I had no self-control or with my portioning and this became the main problem. After years of bad dieting and little to no exercise, our unhealthy life style came to bite us in the butt. In October 1998, when I was just in third grade, my mom, who worked at my school had us come to her room after school. This wasn't strange because we'd been to her room plenty of times before, but this time was different. It was then, in that room, that she told us the news. My dad was taken to the hospital that day because he had experienced a massive heart attack. Being 8, this is a very hard concept to grasp: that you may never see your dad again. She wasn't sure how he was doing; all she knew was that it was bad. We ended up going to visit him in the hospital that night. When we got there are priest met us up in his room. The scariest part of the whole experience was when the priest started praying for him. Only really sick people had the priest pray for them, so this terrified me. Whether it was his prayers or the work of the the incredible staff at the hospital, he made an almost full recovery. He underwent surgerys on his chest to try to reverse the damage of the heart attack. He still has the scars up and down his forearms, chest, and thighs from where they went in to unblock his arteries. When he finally got home we realized that we had to do something different or my dad's fate was going to be the same for the rest of us. It was a family effort to turn our lives around, but had to. We started eating healthier, threw out all of the junk food in our house, cut back on portions, and started exercising on a regular basis. My parents enrolled in H2O Aerobics at our local pool and exercise classes at the "Y". This went on for a couple of years; we all could see the changes in our lives: we were losing weight and feeling better. As soon as the feeling of accomplishment started setting in, we had another giant setback in our family's goals and lives. Having one parent almost die of a heart attack is truly a horrible experience, but having two? Yes. In the fall of 2002, just four years after my dad had a heart attack, I learned that my mother was also taken to the hospital for chest pains. Because of my father's attack, my mother was made aware of all of the symptoms of this problem, so when she started having chest pains and problems with her left arm at work she decided not to take any chances. She called 911 from the school and was taken away in an ambulance not 10 minutes later. This was just another struggle that my family had to deal with. Because she had reacted so fast to the symptoms, she ended up with little damage to her heart. Compared to my father's full-on heart attack, she was lucky; she was able to come home after a while at the hospital. My family has been getting back on track since then. Knock on wood, but we've had no problems since then and my family is closer because of the strain of these horrible experiences.
