The past week and a half have been interesting, to say the least. My father, who had been admitted to the hospital at the beginning of March, went back into the hospital one day after his discharge with more heart problems. His defibrillator wouldn’t stop firing, leaving him exhausted and his body unable to cope with the stress.
He agreed to sedation and a ventilator in order to rest. He then developed pneumonia, which was leading to kidney failure. By last Thursday, things were looking bleak. My family drove to Columbus to see my dad, perhaps for the last time. We sat down (at least the part of my family that was stateside) and discussed options, what Dad would want, and how we needed to proceed. I watched my mother grieve for her husband while he lay in that hospital bed, getting weaker and weaker. I watched small glimmers of hope that seemed like poison, from doctors that gave seemingly conflicting information. I prayed, or at least tried to.
Then, on Saturday, things appeared to turn around. My father’s kidneys started acting like kidneys again. His blood pressure, which had been dangerously low while on two different types of medication to keep it raised, was starting to stabilize. His heart was pumping with a somewhat regular rhythm. Grief turned back into hope for my mother, who took each one of these events as a sign for the better. I, however, just didn’t know.
We’d prepared our minds for what we thought was the inevitable. My family was saying goodbye to our miracle man–the man that had died and come back to life a decade earlier. When he started responding to treatment, I didn’t know what to think. I had prepared myself so thoroughly for the possibility of his death that I refused to believe there was any alternative.
See, in situations like this, hope is a bitch. She reels you in with whispers that everything will be different this one time, that things are going to turn around. That everything will be even better than “Okay”. She hooks you and then she poisons you. Reality falls short of expectations. Hell, sometimes reality just takes one look at hope and laughs. These are the times I worry about–the times when hope lies. This is what I was afraid of with my father, so I refused to give in to the hope that he would recover.
Seeing my father in that bed, unconscious and frail, that man wasn’t the man that taught me how to fish, how to use a hammer, how to ride a bike. That man was a shell. I was furious with anyone who tried to say anything to the contrary. I told myself that my father wasn’t in that shell anymore, but now it seems he was. My father is being weaned off the ventilator today. Time will tell whether or not his body will tolerate being off the machine, but he is better enough to try it. The miracle man may just ride again.