What a week! It wasn’t enough to have finals and Christmas to get ready for- I had to add doing appetizers for 20-25 seventh graders this Sunday to the list. By Wednesday night I was feeling pretty good. I had done well enough on the finals that I knew my grades were OK- Juries on Friday was all I had left to finish the semester. I had gotten the food for the kids and stocked the fridge with all of it in anticipation. So I made a list of tasks for Thursday that included addressing our Christmas cards, making a few calls, rehearsing my songs, running a few errands and finally, FINALLY reading my script for Heartbreak House.
On Thursday I got up and began to address the envelopes and sign the Christmas cards while watching TV. The phone rang and although caller ID showed an unfamiliar number I answered anyway and in my regular voice (I have been practicing my British dialect on unsuspecting junk callers.) It was someone who lives near my parents who had just happened upon them and found out they were not OK and had sent my dad by ambulance to Brookwood Hospital. I had been trying to call them for days but got no answer. They live in the middle of nowhere and their phone goes out A LOT! Usually when it is several days that I get no answer I begin to worry- my mom is a recluse so always there to answer a call. However in the past, after several days of no answer, Tim and I will drive the hour to their house and when we get there they are amused that we worried and drove that far- usually they will laugh at us and we leave there furious. So this time when I did not reach them from Saturday until Tuesday, Tim and I discussed driving out there but with finals ahead I said no, all they do is laugh at us when we get there and I have been humiliated enough lately and don’t need that! So now two days later I hear that the phone is out of order but my dad was too ill to drive for help, my mom, who is useless, sat and watched him dieing and fretted but did nothing. Luckily this neighbor came along.
I headed to the hospital where I waited for the ambulance that brought in a white, incoherent version of my father. After questions that he answered differently every time and a few blood tests they determined that he was bleeding out somehow. His blood count was 11, at 20-30 you get a transfusion, at 9-10 you usually die. A transfusion was ordered and they feared heart attacks because his enzymes were off and with no blood to your brain and heart, organs begin to suffer.
All the while I am in communication with the neighbor and my mother by way of the neighbor’s cell phone. My mother does not want to leave the house to come to the hospital, after all she needs to feed the dogs. So I continue to handle things until Dad is put in CCU long after visiting hours and I am forced to come home.
Friday I head to Montevallo at 6:45 am to sing for a grade and was able for once to clear my mind and just sing. Usually any little thing throws me off but I did a good job of concentrating on the task at hand and then I headed to Vandiver to get my mom. It was a little over an hour drive to her house where I found a situation that I am too distraught and embarrassed by to write about here. It is one of those things I have to deal with in my mind before I can even try to share it with anyone. I finally convinced my mom to head to Brookwood although I could tell she was uncomfortable and ready to be home before we got back to a main road. Traffic was horrendous due to Christmas shoppers so it took almost two more hours to get to the hospital. I felt like I had been driving all morning.
At the hospital my mom totally lost it and I had to deal with her as well as my dad and his care. They took him for a test and discovered sores on his esophagus, a hernia, an ulcer and a closing of the connection between his stomach and intestines. All easy enough to fix. They just had to keep giving him more blood (six units at last count) to try to get the count up. As soon as we heard those results my mom begged me to get her home. So Tim drove us home by way of Whole Foods where I got her a decent meal to take with her and eat later on.
I am glad to say when I called this morning that my dad’s count is up to almost 30, still low but much better and he is looking and sounding more like himself. The nurse said they are moving him from CCU into a regular room this afternoon and doing a few more tests tomorrow so he will be there another night. I plan to go see him in a bit although at this point I have little to say. Even in his weakened state he was changing every subject I started back to himself and how great he is and was. He had few kind words for me even though I dropped everything to take care of him. I am torn between my duty as his daughter and my total irritation at the situation they have put themselves in and their lack of desire to make it any better. I watched him cry Thursday as if recognition came over him that indeed he is getting old and that he is mortal and might die some day, something I would have thought a zoologist would have realized! It is amazing how many people don’t really get that though, and it has always been weird to me how aware of that fact I have always been. But when I tell him he will have to eat better, cut back a little and that he will have to make other changes he blasts me and refuses to even listen.
So there I am, tempted to just let them have at it and if they kill themselves in the process, so be it. On the other hand I know I can not do that so there is lots of stress and heartache ahead. At least I have a few weeks off from school to try to get things in some sense of order before I head back- who am I kidding? I will start this next semester just like every other, torn between what I want to do, need to do and have to do.
