My husband's alive! What are YOU thankful for? Write a Thanku for Poetry Friday!

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Howdy Campers ~  Happy Poetry Friday!  I hope your Thanksgiving was all that you hoped for.  Mine certainly was...

But first, Franki and Mary Lee of A Year of Reading are our Poetry Friday hosts today--thank you, ladies!

And speaking of thank you: for two weeks, we TeachingAuthors are extending the celebration of Thanksgiving by giving thanks to those who've made a difference in our writing lives.  We'd love you to join us: in a Thanku or in prose, 25 words or less, due November 30th.  See Carmela's most recent post for the specifics.

I've taken a break from blogging these last few weeks; this is the most incredibly appropriate topic with which to dive back in.

In a nutshell, on the afternoon of Monday, October 29th, my best friend/husband collapsed and stopped breathing.  After 11 days in the ICU, he is fabulously, miraculously, terrifically, fine and dandy.(October 29th is also the date that Hurricane Sandy struck.  We didn't notice.)

My husband, apparently, has all sorts of angels keeping him on the grassy side of our galaxy. 
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Angels, angels, angels.  I picture them pushing him back, denying him entrance on that October afternoon.  

Today I thank all those angels...and the humans who saved his life. I've been thinking a lot about the movie Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow.  The movie itself wasn't my favorite, but the premise was wonderful.  Essentially the movie splits into two stories--in one, she barely makes it onto a London train. In the other, she misses it.

There are so many to thank for putting my family on this train.  My 23-year-old son (aka my rock.)  Relatives. Friends.  Strangers. His friend and partner who started chest compressions.  The police officer. The paramedics who did that paddle thing on him.  Twice.  Everyone at Little Company of Mary hospital--wow.  Those awesome ICU nurses never sit down.  

(Everyone, except, perhaps, the cheerful man who greeted me in the ER with a form to fill out, before I knew if my husband was dead or alive.  I've had the experience of going to a hospital and being informed my father had died.  I was 22 then.  This time I knew what to ask.  I looked him in the eye and said evenly, "You are handing me a registration form.  That means he's alive, right?"  "Oh, no," he said brightly, "we register everyone.")

I want to write a Thanku to the people who invented and perfected therapeutic hypothermia, a protocol in which the patient's body is cooled and placed in a sort of medically induced coma for a few days, to let the body rest and to prevent further damage to the brain and heart.
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I just looked up this treatment in Wikipedia and see that I owe thanks to a whole slew of folks who developed this over the ages, beginning with Hippocrates.

Here, then, is my Thanku to all of them:

A THANKU TO ALL THE
DOCTORS, SURGEONS, RESEARCHERS, NURSES, INVENTORS—
ALL THE OUT-OF-THE-BOX THINKERS THROUGH THE AGES—
FOR DEVELOPING THERAPEUTIC HYPOTHERMIA

Together, you rolled
the snowball down the hill that
saved my friend.  Thank you.
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I especially want to thank Dr. Robert Chang, who was in charge of my husband's care.  He is accessible, caring, direct, genuine and brilliant.
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                                             WRITING WORKOUT--

                                           Who would you like to thank?

Now it's your turn.  We're focusing on those who helped us in our writing life, but you can see that I've interpreted this broadly.

1) Who has helped you on the writer's road?

2) Write a Thanku or a 25-word-or-less thank you in any form, poetry or prose.

3) Share it with us.  You can do so in one of three ways:
a) a comment on one of our posts,
b) an email to us at teachingauthors [at] gmail [dot] com,
c) by writing a thank-you blog post of your own and then sharing the link with us via 1) or 2). Feel free to copy and paste the image below into your blog post. We'd love if you'd also link back to this post and invite others to participate. 

4) And don't forget to send it to the person you're thanking!

 And thank YOU, Frankie and Mary Lee of A Year of Reading, for hosting Poetry Friday today!