Starting on Tuesday May 28th

Stan's morning began just as most any other work day for him. He had asked for a couple of advils because he wasn't feeling great. This was nothing out of the ordinary for him so neither of us thought anything of it. He gave me a long hug and a kiss and left to work. We texted as usual throughout the morning.  At 1:30 I got a phone call. The caller ID said it was Stan. When I answered it was not Stan but a co-worker Matt. Matt told me that he had been talking with Stan when he returned to his desk and asked Matt to just give him a minute.  After a few seconds Matt could see he was not getting any better so called 911.  The ambulance picked him up and as he got to the hospital, he went into cardiac arrest. Due to the fact that he flat lined for so long the doctors have been very concerned about whether or not his brain has been affected and to what extreme.  Upon entering the ER, the paramedics began CPR.  This was continued for about 45 minutes.  During this time, they also used the shock paddles to start his heart. It didn't work so they had to put the catheter in his artery for the heart bypass machine while doing CPR. This saved his life.
It took hours after this for him to be stabilized. Before I could see him, the Dr's performed surgery to put a stint in his artery to open it up. It was closed off 100%. His blood pressure was very low and even with medications, would not go up. I still hadn't been able to see him yet and it didn't look like it was going to happen anytime soon. A couple hours later, his blood pressure was still very low and they were concerned about internal bleeding.  I was finally able to see him just before he was taken in for the CAT scan to find the bleeding. He was swollen and looked horrible but he was at least breathing and his heart was pumping, sort of. About an hour or two later, they came back and said they found the bleeding and that it was a pocket of fluid around his heart. They drained the fluid but then needed to repair the hole that was leaking.  They thought it was either his right atrium or his inferior vena cava but wouldn't know until they could visually see it. This was when I decided to bring my kids in so they could see him.  I had tried to keep my kids from knowing exactly what was happening but at this point, I didn't know if he was going to make it. Every time a Dr came to see us, it was bad news and they finished with, "his chances of survival are slim". Our family did get to see him just before he went in for open heart surgery.  His surgery began about 11:30 PM and was supposed to last 2-4 hours. Both sides of our family was here and the hospital was very accommodating, even going as far as letting us wait in an ICU room.  During this surgery they wanted to move the heart machine to his chest instead of his thigh.  While removing the catheter, they found that the artery was damaged and needed to be repaired. This part of the surgery ended up taking about 4 hours extra. He was finally out of surgery about 7 AM. It was still a couple more hours before he was stable enough to move up to the ICU.  The surgeon ended up cutting a portion of his artery in his thigh out and replacing it with a synthetic tubing.  During this surgery, his leg where the artery was cut, began to swell. They ended up needing to cut large incisions into his calf to reduce the swelling.  These may require skin grafts to close. This was about 10 hours from my first phone call.