So this week has been a blur. This reflection will be more of a “how gracious my instructors are” rather than a “this is what I understood from the week.

I started my week with great intentions. I picked up my kids on Monday after school, on Tuesday I realized (thanks to my 336 pod) that we had a reading coming up for our Psychology class that needed to be read soon. However I spent that day teaching a grade 12 class from PCS how to play disc golf. My plan was to do the reading when I got home from that and then meet with my pod before heading into class. Ever have grand plans that’s fall apart at the last minute? That is exactly what mine did. On the way home from disc golf I wound up having a heart attack. I made it the rest of the way home before collapsing, and within 15 minutes of being home I had several ambulances and a firetruck infant of my house. Ninety minutes after collapsing I was in a recovery room, and an hour or so after that I was in class again. Though admittedly I got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from being in the class.

I am not one to shirk my responsibilities, and I figure at this point I can show up to online classes without much problem. Which is true. I have learned I am really good at sitting down right now, but a five minute walk down the road wipes me out completely. Making breakfast that is more than a bowl of cereal results in my having a multi hour nap while Thanksgiving dinner is being prepared, four kids are cheering at a tv screen, a food processor is running in the kitchen, and kids are smashing stuff around in the living room. Who knew right?

So this week has seen virtually no schoolwork done, which means I need to do some serious catchup when I can. However, some aspect of this are difficult. For example, my right arm is a mess of pain when I use it, because that is how they accessed my heart to install a pair of stents. Thats right, they went in through my right wrist to get to my heart. WHAT THE HECK!

Anyways, enough of that, I may wind up doing a separate blog post about the event just to chronicle it, because I really hope its a once in a lifetime experience…

What I have learned though is that instructors are ridiculously understanding. I have not asked to have extensions, but they have been offered left right and centre. This is radically different from previous experience when my wife decided to remove me from our house and I had an English professor tell me that marital problems (and temporary homelessness) are not a valid reason to receive an extension on a paper. I hope to not have to take any of my instructors up on their offers of extensions, but knowing that they exist, and that if need be I can delay an assignment, the end date of a class, or even my graduation from the program in order to complete everything, takes a lot of stress off my system. I will still be skipping out on the extension project for the socials class as it is optional and that honestly seems like a good idea to me right now. But I may change my mind the day before the due date.

For now, I am set up to make it through the next few weeks with a wealth of support from classmates, instructors, a few close friends, and my church family. All told I would 100% not recommend going through this, but the outpouring of support that I have been shown has been phenomenal.