I'm sitting in my old motorhome that I use as a home office of sorts, thinking about my dad, who is currently 25 miles away, in a hospital. He's there because this afternoon, when I got up after having a late night working and trying to deal with my own horrid back pain, I awoke to find my mom pestering my dad to stop being so stubborn and call a doctor. He's had bad stomach and back pain for the last few days, and a cough that leaves him gasping for air -- for at least the past 2 weeks. He's also been overworking himself during our move from my deceased grandfathers house that we couldn't afford to buy, and into my parents house, mostly so that I could be there for them in times exactly like this -- even though I can't outrightly let them know that's what I'm here for. Then, this morning, at about 2am, he says that he was woken up by a horrible pain in his upper right abdomen.
Personally, I was there in the living room near his room, just getting ready to go up to bed yesterday morning, when I heard his death rattle of a cough wake him up. It's been difficult for me to listen to him cough like that, knowing the hollow parts of my bones that the cough is signaling his nearing mortality, and knowing that I can neither say anything about to him, nor do anything to prevent it. So I know that it wasn't the pain that woke him up, but the fact that he'd stopped breathing, and his body had woken him up to get him to try and take in air again.
Though dad's memory and awareness are not what they once where, and so we're not quite sure what he's really aware of and what he's not. So for the most part, we can only go with what he's been telling the doctors. That he woke up at 2am with a horrible pain in his upper abdomen, which at first he thought might have just been a stuck poop, which he didn't want to tell them was because he had been refusing to eat properly the past 2 weeks, because he falls right asleep about ten minutes after he eats everytime. Thankfully, my mother isn't shy about tattling on him, so that doctors did get that information. Though he continued on from there, to say that he took some milk of magnesia to try and calm his tummy, but found that even after several good bowel movements and even a few fits of vomitting, he still didn't feel any better.
By the time we had been waiting in the first Emergency Room in Everett, for over 4 hours, he was already outwardly much worse than he'd started when my mom had first nervously asked me to drive him to see a local doctor and then to drive them both to the emergency room from there. I couldn't help but already feel myself missing him, even though he was still siting right there in front of me, with his skin turning whiter and whiter, and his face contorting in pain more increasingly as time went on and no relief was anywhere in sight.
We left that waiting room after 4.5 hours of watching little kids under 10, and all the elderly folks over 65 all being ignored in the waiting room while 15-40 year olds went in and were sent home within 30 minutes of first arriving (after we had arrived). A little boy who couldn't have been much older than my 6 year old, had to sit in a wheel chair with a gruesomely broken leg for 3 of the hours we'd been there, with his mom doing everything to try and keep him calm. An older woman who was brought in on a stretcher from an ambulance, was shoved off the stretcher and put into a wheel chair just 20 minutes after we'd arrived and was still waiting there with chest pains and a nearly empty oxygen tank when we'd left after 4.5 hours. Another older gentleman was left there as well, trying to find any comfortable position while dealing with large kidney stones that his doctor told him were damaging his kidneys, and was why his doc sent him to the ER in the first place. Two more older woman sat down a little ways, looking up every time the ER door opened, hoping they would be next even though they'd had yet to have been called for more than 6 hours.
If I'd had a big passenger van, I would've loaded them all up in it and taken them around to hospitals with beds, and more importantly -- no practice of leaving the elderly and very young to waste away in waiting rooms while young patients who could drive and walk themselves in, went in and out with no problems.
Sadly, I didn't have the resources to do any of that. Though I could at very least, make sure my dad got the help he needed, which is why I went outside and called around until I found the nearest hospital that took his insurance, had open beds, had low wait times, had surgeons, and at least said that they went by the priority of what was wrong with someone, regardless of their age.
That ended up being a hospital in Edmonds, the very same one I was born at in fact.
It took over 30 minutes when it could've taken 15, because my dad refused to let me drive the way I knew to get there the fastest, and wanted to direct me how to get there from the way he usually went. Though that 30 minutes was worth it, as after 4.5 hours at the first place, dad was vocally saying he was ready to just go back to his lazy chair at home and take a bunch of pain killers until he stopped hurting and damn the consequences if no one at a hospital was going to actually help him. Though in less than 1.5 hours, they had already triaged and checked him out, and then shortly after gotten him into an actual room and gotten him moderately comfortable. Within another 40 minutes they had already done some basic tests and then given him something to lower his pain at least a few notches while they figured out what was going on with him.
Within the 4.5 hours that we had waited at the first hospital, the second one had already done xrays, ultrasounds, a cat scan, lowered his pain enough that he could sleep, and had ruled out appendicitis. Even without a clear diagnosis and many concerns still wafting over our heads, the Edmonds hospital had already done ten times more than the first, and I can't describe just how relieving that was. Especially after spending the entire day texting back and forth with my 12 year old, whose never seen his grandpa so sick, trying to get him to text me pictures of his grandpa's medicines for me to list for the doctor, because dad couldn't remember what they were all called.
Just seeing my aged and frail father laying there in a hospital bed, snoring away, was so much more relieving than trying to come up with all sorts of ways to distract and comfort him in a freezing waiting room while he writhed in pain.
When I last saw him, mom and I had just gotten back to his hospital room at 4am, after driving the half hour back home, mostly just to get her a sweater because she her body has a hard time regulating her internal temperature anymore, but we also went to get dad some more comfortable clothes that wouldn't interfer with his hospital gown and IV, but would still keep him warm and comfortable.
I still remember asking him if he'd like a blanket, after he'd been asking mom if she would bring him an easier zip up sweater, and he looked at me, as if no one had ever thought to ask him such a thing. He thought about it for a moment, and then looked at my mom and asked if she would bring him the square blanket she made for him last xmas. We brought that blanket with us and laid it across him, to keep him warmer than the way too thin hospital sheets, and he immediately looked more comfortable. He even told several nurses how happy he was to be wrapped in a blanket his wife had made just for him.
It pained me a little, to look over and see that my mom was more annoyed at his endearing behavor than anything else. After almost 50 years of marriage and a very strong predaliction towards holding grudges, even when her husband laid in a hospital bed clearing needing some empathy and doing his best to show her he loved her in his own weird ways, she still couldn't find it anywhere within herself to just love him and not be annoyed at the fact that he'd waited so long to see a doctor in the first place.
In fact, out of the entire day that we'd been with dad, the only time I saw her display any genuine comfort or affection for him, was when we were sitting in the second waiting room and he looked like he was nearly ready to pass out from the pain. I remember it specifically, because it was so unusual. We'd just been having a debate, because neither of my parents could seem to remember how old I was exactly, and then dad went quite. I turned to him and asked if he'd like his gingerale, the only thing he'd allow us to get him to drink, and he just shook his head the slightest bit. He looked like he couldn't muster more movement than that, and in his other hand he held one of the vomit bags at the ready. It was after a few moments of that, when mom reached out just barely, and put her hand on the end of his knee. Not even her full hand, just her fingers, and just on the end of his knee cap, which I'm not postive he has any physical feeling in anymore and honestly not sure if he noticed it between the pain. But it happened, and it raised such a weird feeling in me, because it was probably one of the only truly heartfelt things I'd seen either one of them do towards one another without prompting, in over 25 years.
Even dad's insistance on having mom around throughout the days endeavors, was not quite the same as her reaching out. Nor was it the same as his look and settled energy when she took the blanket he'd asked for, out of the bag she packed and laid it over him. Seeing those things happen, made me both incredibly happy that they happened in the moment, and also incredible sad that they were so few and far between, and only inspired by similar types of emergencies.
Though that's pretty much been the state of my parents relationship since I was at least 7 years old. There's many reasons they use to explain, none of which I'll go into in this particular post. Though I will say that their relationship has created in me a fear of ending up in a similar relationship, where you feel trapped in a commitment with someone you love but aren't passionate about and are eternally frustrated with because as much as you love each other, you just aren't compatible.
It's that same sort of thing that I often get anxious about while sitting in this same motorhome, especially this morning, as I not only worry about my dad, but also about my partner, who's ex-wifes mother just died last night while we were in the hospital with my dad. Just as my mother was more annoyed with my dad for stubbornly putting himself in the position of needing to go into an emergency room in the first place, I found myself feeling helplessly frustrated with my partner, who completely clamed and closed up after hearing of his ex-mother-in-laws death. I could see very clearly that he needed consoling and support, but he didn't seem to want any of that from me. No hugs or kisses or words or silent precense seemed to be any comfort to him, and no amount of asking or just trying to do things for him that would otherwise had helped, seemed to provide him with any comfort. In fact, it seemed to annoy him more than anything, which just plain hurt.
It made me feel mad at him for being so distraight and not allowing me to help, and also at the same time making him unavailable to support me in my own silent panic about my father. It made me feel mad at my mother also, which was strange, because she never allows my dad to comfort her either, or when she does it's only because she doesn't want to hurt his feelings, but then goes around telling everyone else how much it annoyed her that he did all of those things. It made me angry at my dad also, for never really stepping out of his own psyche to see and really truly love my mother the way she needed for so many decades, until recenetly, as they both near their ends, when she's too mad to care anymore, and he's too old and forgetful to really make up for any of it, as much as he may genuinely want to.
And of course, being mad at all of them, made me much more angry with myself.
Regardless of what brought us all to the places we are all in now, things are the way they are, and there isn't much more than anyone can do to change the current tides, except to just let it all go and love each other with all we've got left.
Which brings me to reason for this post, as well as the reason I've created this blog -- to talk about the shadowy parts of human lives, especially my own, that we often either can't or don't want to put into words. Death, aging, pain, shame, anger, sadness, dementia, adolescents, hate, impatiences, anxiety, stubborness, guilt, and so on. We all go through them and sit with them at many points in our lives, some more than others, some less. None of them are 'bad' or 'negative' per say... they just 'are'. Though we feel they are bad, so we stuff them away into the darker recesses of our minds and lives, trying not to think about them so much.
After listening to my mom some years ago, complain that her own father never wrote anything down about his life before her birth, and about how many things she wished she'd written down herself, I've decided not to wait to write my own stories and experiences, especially those that are harder to talk about, or which I don't have an incarnate body to converse about with it.
In this way, I hope to both help myself come to terms with these chapters in my own life, and also to provide some sort of.... significance or maybe solidarity with those of you who are also going through similar times, or who might go through them soon. It is my hope that for you, this blog ight become a source of comfort, openness, helpful information, and likeminded experiences. I'll mostly be blogging about my own thoughts and experiences, though I plan to write some articles and informational pieces here and there.I also hope, that over time, you'll share with me your own experiences in the comments or in an email to me, after which we might be able to offer each other some coonecting and comfort in ways that only two humans going through similar experiences can do for each other.
Though even if these pages and posts end up doing none of that, at least they'll be here, maybe for my sons and their kids, as a record of these chapters in our lives, as I experienced them. That in and of itself, can be more valuable than it seems at first glance, especially when I'm gone from this incarnation myself.
These are the things I've been thinking about for the past week, after driving the moving van of our lives to the house where my parents live, thinking that I'm moving into the home where my parents will die, my children will grow, and my own intimate relationship will either flourish or come to an end as well. This is the chapter in my life about the Shadows between Life and Death...
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