Time Is The Most Valuable Thing A Man Can Spend

Life changed for me 10 weeks ago.

My step father who I wrote about in the past and who's been the rock in our family fell at 4 am using the bathroom.

We had just installed guard rails around the house 2 weeks prior. He had been couch bound for around 3 years. Getting up only to do daily chores. Using his walker to feed the dogs, chickens and my mom's new goats.

He helped my adopted brother and sister with their homework from the couch and would make sure he made it to the dinner table every night.

My brother heard him fall and thankfully helped my mom at 66 years old carry him to a chair where they realized he wasn't breathing well. He went to the hospital, again.

This time was different. They found his emphysema was causing apathy in his left leg and right foot and his blood oxygen was dangerously low. 75%-85% the first week in the hospital before they moved him to a long term senior rehab center.

No matter how prepared you are in life for certain obstacles, nothing will prepare you for hearing your mom cry.

Nothing in life prepared me to see both sisters refuse to leave the hospital their dad was in. No job, husband, brother, dogs at home were going to remove them from his bedside as he stared off ashamed to have caused all of this as he put it.

I became quick to help. I took over his chores and help my mom where I can. Nothing surprises me now.

She doesn't know how to lock her own home of 36 years, Wally handles all the keys. Doesn't know how to turn on any TV in the home, that's Wally's job. Bills? He pays them.

14 and 16 year old brother and sister don't know how to use the microwave or the stove because he apparently gets up to do both for them? Mind boggling.

I got used to sleeping 70 miles from my own bed. Little by little we all got used to our routines.

I have to tell you that I'm not as worried about Wally as I am my mom and sisters. They're so in love with their husband and father.

I've felt a lot but anger in our entire system of elderly care in this country is my biggest enemy. I can safely attest to a few things that everyone should know.

If you have a loved one and they're getting up there in age. The hospital, the rehab centers, the senior care center they do not give a shit about you, that person or that family. You're a number, a bed and a billing address.

2 weeks in the hospital should have been 6, 4 weeks in the rehab center should have been a year but that insurance company is going to fight you tooth and nail. You can appeal and plead even when someone has a teacher's union health insurance it becomes a waiting game of when is he going home.

Then he comes home and my mom, sisters and are to take care of him. Physical therapists stop by the house 3 times a week, occupational therapists stop by twice a week, nurse daily.

Then it's a series of gadgets and oxygen lines that everyone of us just hopes we listened to the instructions were given on a 20 minute discharge/fast learning course.

The biggest obstacle is Wally has lost some cognitive intelligence. He is tired and wants to be left alone. He doesn't want to do his up and down exercise every other hour, he doesn't want to play the simple 20 question game or wheel of fortune and he one day wants to be left alone and the next day wants to know why everyone is leaving him alone.

3 ambulance rides in 3 months and he's exhausted. My mom and sisters have aged in the last months I can see it. They're battling and I suggested family therapy which was actually hilarious as my mom was a therapist at one time (I always forget) and quit because she didn't believe in her work, she chose social work.

I work on college football, bet my MLB and try to never look at my phone in the families presence. It's such a hard habit to break.

Do I really need to know what the royals score is right now? I asked myself this while I would visit Wally in the senior center every week, same question.

My relationships have grown stronger. Yee and I celebrated 4 years in June. We didn't see a lot of each other and the last few weeks we have really made the best of it. Hiking, cooking, her giving me detroit lions updates and watching her action movies before I work on college football every night.

I'll be the best man in another wedding. Third time now, I think I'm running out of good joke material for speeches. Teddy a great friend finally popped the question after 5 years and their trying to have a big family right away.

I drove far too long but got to see Bret, my best friends stand up comedy. Apparently sky diving, snowboarding Japan, Canada and Americas largest slopes while being helicoptered onto them wasn't enough he now wants to stand on a stage and not make people laugh! He keeps telling me it's getting better...

A runner who ripped me off and we were very close before she stole someone's bankroll that I vouched for her.

She contacted me and we had coffee and while she had no money for me, she did confess to a drug problem and 6 weeks of sobriety. I don't know if she will stay clean but in that moment, I didn't know how to feel. It had been more than a year.

I was so hurt not by the money, that comes and goes in my world but the fact she could rob me, me! I gave her everything and she threw it away for 10 days of getting high. She confessed all of this and asked for my forgiveness and a payment plan but I know that payment isn't coming but the closure was so important to me, it came when I needed it most.

Chan and her mom are moving to Cambodia which hurts but they bought 2 very small homes in the ghetto in 2005 in Denver for 200k each... They're gonna live like the queens that they are.

I kept thinking they were bluffing and I would see Chan at my house with her money fanny pack and her notebook every mon-wed morning of football season but when the for sale sign came up on her yard last Monday I knew it was all too real. That's life, it hurts a little and I can't be any prouder of one the best people I've ever met in my life.

I didn't make it to wsop and still lost money, that's a first. I don't think I'll make it to bet bash but I might try to get there for a night.

I'm going with Yee to her nieces wedding next week in North Carolina and we will begin planning our own soon after.

Time is flying and I'm trying to make the most of it. It goes so, so fast.

I'll get into work updates and regular scheduled gambling talk next blog. Thank you so much to all of you who reached out and all the messages.

Thanks for the space as always, Eddie