![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
some father's day musings
Jun. 17th, 2018 05:36 pmBack in late January, I posted (among other things):
I'd intended to write more about this, but never got around to it. I guess Father's Day is an appropriate time to reflect on this experience. ( Musings on caring for my father. )
So it was a stressful, horrible, crazy, sleepless time. But there were good things I took away from it, and I'm grateful for the lessons I learned about family and love, even if it was not much fun to learn them.
The story, by the way, has a happy ending. Dad began to improve after he got home, sleeping a little less, eating a little more, and becoming more engaged and "present". I think this was partly due to being in a familiar environment with his wife, and partly due to having a live-in CNA to help him, along with in-home physical and occupational therapy. A month later we moved them into an assisted living facility that's actually only walking distance from my youngest brother's house. It was tough at first, and they're still not completely comfortable, but it is the right place for them right now, and Dad's continuing to get better. He was in a wheelchair when we moved him there; now it sits in the closet, and he gets around with a cane. His cognition and short-term memory are much stronger, though he still doesn't remember much about what happened last winter, and maybe that's a good thing. Last month the facility dropped him down a tier in their "levels of care" rubric, because he doesn't need the assistance he needed when he arrived. He's reading again, and using his computer again, and when I called today for Father's Day - and I just realized it's exactly six months after he had the cerebral hemorrhage - he sounded nearly like his old self again, talking about politics and science and asking questions about the things I'm doing.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, well, a bunch of platitudes about love being the strongest and most important thing, and about rising to the occasion and doing what's necessary, even when you don't think you can, and about how it doesn't feel like sacrifice when it's for someone you care about, or at least most of the time it doesn't. It sounds kind of silly, I guess. But it turns out to be true. All of it.
[After a weekend of skiing and mountain biking in mid-December, we] got home, put away our gear, showered, and sat down to dinner...and my phone rang. It was my youngest brother, telling me that my father was in the hospital, having just suffered a cerebral hemorrhage...and my mother was due to return from the nursing rehab center [where she'd been after hospitalization for a bad fall two weeks earlier] the next day! He and his family live fairly close to our parents, and they'd been helping out while Mom had been in the nursing center, but having simultaneous health crises with both parents was a bit much to cope with.
And so I flew out to Maryland on a one-way ticket the next day, after spending the morning on the phone with my brother, checking flight schedules online, and emailing my (extremely understanding) boss. Four incredibly difficult but rewarding weeks later, after getting the situation more or less stabilized, I finally came back home.
I'd intended to write more about this, but never got around to it. I guess Father's Day is an appropriate time to reflect on this experience. ( Musings on caring for my father. )
So it was a stressful, horrible, crazy, sleepless time. But there were good things I took away from it, and I'm grateful for the lessons I learned about family and love, even if it was not much fun to learn them.
The story, by the way, has a happy ending. Dad began to improve after he got home, sleeping a little less, eating a little more, and becoming more engaged and "present". I think this was partly due to being in a familiar environment with his wife, and partly due to having a live-in CNA to help him, along with in-home physical and occupational therapy. A month later we moved them into an assisted living facility that's actually only walking distance from my youngest brother's house. It was tough at first, and they're still not completely comfortable, but it is the right place for them right now, and Dad's continuing to get better. He was in a wheelchair when we moved him there; now it sits in the closet, and he gets around with a cane. His cognition and short-term memory are much stronger, though he still doesn't remember much about what happened last winter, and maybe that's a good thing. Last month the facility dropped him down a tier in their "levels of care" rubric, because he doesn't need the assistance he needed when he arrived. He's reading again, and using his computer again, and when I called today for Father's Day - and I just realized it's exactly six months after he had the cerebral hemorrhage - he sounded nearly like his old self again, talking about politics and science and asking questions about the things I'm doing.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, well, a bunch of platitudes about love being the strongest and most important thing, and about rising to the occasion and doing what's necessary, even when you don't think you can, and about how it doesn't feel like sacrifice when it's for someone you care about, or at least most of the time it doesn't. It sounds kind of silly, I guess. But it turns out to be true. All of it.
