Elderly parent

Most of us have to deal with this at some point in our lives. My mother died instantly more than fifteen years ago, what a way to go, no slow decline, just an instantaneous loss of consciousness and almost immediate death. She was driving and out and about visiting friends the day before and she would have known nothing about it.

My Dad is a different matter. He is in hospital having suffered from pneumonia, fast atrial fibrillation and heart failure. His GP was about to write it off as a virus when I asked him to listen to my Dad’s lungs again. I’m not a fan of his GP by the way. All charm and no fucking action. Oh, and yes, I am going to swear in this blog post. I don’t normally, but tonight I really fucking feel like it

Dad has been in hospital for three weeks now. The hospital is 320 miles from where I live. There is a social services care package in place and he’s supposedly due to go home tomorrow. Unfortunately though, he fell out of bed , head first, on Wednesday morning and split his head open. I saw him that afternoon and he had a 2 1/2″ gash in his forehead with a large haematoma. He had also lost what was left of his fragile confidence. Will he come out of hospital tomorrow? I will only find out when I ring the ward. If I were a betting man I wouldn’t put anything on it though.

The only problem is, the longer he stays in hospital, the more depressed he becomes.

It is a strange feeling when one of your parents tells you that sometimes they think it would be better if they went to sleep and never woke up and you can see their point.

I’m almost ashamed to talk about the impact on me. I’m not the one who has limited quality of life, but it has affected me. For one thing I have a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday. One of the things I will be saying is that I have been drinking far too much over the last fortnight. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes that knowledge isn’t enough. I have to tell them, because they have to know. Again I’m rather ashamed of it, but at the same time I’m not fucking surprised it’s happened.

Ah well. Let’s hope it all turns out well in the end. After all, why not end this post on a fucking platitude?

By the way, I’m not going to edit this post, because it is straight from the heart. If there are any typos or grammatical errors, I don’t fucking care. If you know what I’m like as a writer, you will know how out of character that is.

I’m not looking for sympathy by the way, it’s just that bottling all this up feels so fucking self destructive that I had to write this and publish it or end up with another panic attack, going for a walk at 3am because I can’t breathe if I stay still.

If anyone reading this is going through similar, I hope it helps to know that you’re not alone.