80

My dad turned 80 years old in December.

Most days he’s a fairly spry 80 but other days, I often see just how old he’s gotten. He’s very thin, which means that when he gets sick, he goes from thin to frail in a matter of hours.

I’d been home from work for a couple of hours on a Monday evening when my sister called me. She asked me if I’d stopped to see Dad on my way home.

I was confused. “You mean in Metz?” I asked.

“No,” she said, very obviously exasperated. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“What message?”

“He’s in the hospital,” she explained. “I left a message on your phone.”

“A text or a voicemail?” I asked.

“I don’t leave voice mails,” she informed haughtily.

Okay then. Moving on.

“What hospital is he in and why is he there?”

She told me that he’d said his heart was racing and he’d fallen twice at her house (he lives there most of the time) so she’d called an ambulance and he was in the ICU at our local hospital.

Wow.

She went on to say that he’d be moved to a regular room the next morning.

So I didn’t go to the hospital that night. I went the next morning around 10:30. He was sound asleep so I left him a note saying I’d be back after work.

He was awake when I got there that afternoon at 4:30 or so.

But he was groggy and confused. He looked terrible. We’re a very white family but he was even paler than usual.

My brother and his boys showed up while I was there and we talked while my dad dozed.

I informed the nurse before I left that Tuesday that if my dad was released the next day, on Wednesday, that I would be the one to come pick him up. I gave her my cell and my work number, asking that they call me when they thought he’d be discharged.

But even though the nurse hadn’t called, my dad had, and so I went.

When I got to the hospital, he was still in his gown with IVs still attached. He was dozing.

He woke up when I walked into his room. He gave me an apologetic smile and said he’d been told they might want to do one more test before they let him go.

“Okay,” I said and put settled in. It was 2:50pm.

Around 3:30, the nurse came in and told me that Dad’s caseworker would be along soon to talk about at-home care.

At 4:15, my dad asked me to get his clothes out of the closet. I asked him why he wanted them, he said it was time for him to get dressed.

Huh. Well.

I got him his pants and told him that he couldn’t put his shirt on yet because he still had a couple of IVs in his arms.

At that point, the nurse came in and told him that she’d help him change into this clothes when it was closer to time to go home but that we’d probably still have at least a half hour wait.

The caseworker came in and we talked about his weakness and how he’d need a lot of help getting around. She suggested home health care. She gave me several pages of information for such things.

At around 4:40 the nurse came back and started helping my dad into his clothes. I looked away as one does when one’s elderly parent is wearing a hospital gown.

Finally, the nurse’s aide arrived with a wheelchair. I left to move the car around to the discharge door.

I was parked and waiting, car running so that my dad wouldn’t have to get into a cold car when the aide came out and told me that the echo tech had shown up and they really wanted to run that one more test. It would be at least another fifteen minutes. She was so sorry.

Eh, whatever. I moved my car back to the parking lot and watched the clock. I moved it back to the discharge door about fifteen minutes later and waited another five minutes and wait, here he comes!!!

The aide and a nurse helped my dad from the wheelchair to my car, where he slouched in the seat as if he couldn’t hold up his own head.

I think he might have been dreaming during these episodes of dosing because while we were sitting in the parking lot of the local CVS (we had to pick up a prescription, don’t you know? And of course it wasn’t ready when we got there, it’ll be another twenty minutes or so, ma’am.)

As we sat out there, my dad came in and out of his dose. At one point he asked me if I was going to get glasses.

Nope, I hadn’t said anything about glasses.

Then my brother called him. My dad struggled to put his phone on speaker so he could hear my brother talk.

When he was done talking, my dad asked, “So what did J say he and the boy were going to get at Wal*Mart?”

“Ummm, they didn’t say anything about Wal*Mart. They’re at karate.”

It was weird and worrying.

I’m hoping he just needed a good night’s sleep in his own bed (couch, as the case may be.)

The nurse said he’d had a lot of Tylenol with codeine over the past few days and that will make a person groggy.

I don’t know.

It’s hard to see your parent so fragile, as I’m sure everyone knows. Once upon a time, my dad was larger than life in my eyes.

I hate watching him fade and yet…I know how lucky I am to still have him here, pushing my boundaries, irritating me. He’s so hard to define and that’s okay too. He’s human, flawed, just like everyone else.

I’m trying to move forward with the attitude that every single moment I have with him his precious rather than watching the clock when he stops by at 9:15 and being annoyed by it.

Then I remind myself that I’m human too and VERY flawed.

Together, we’ll figure it all out.