Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 October 2005 20:13:03
I'm sitting here, wishing I had one - that today could simply bypass the part of my body where my feelings are all tangled up and I could simply get on with the mundanities like loading the dishwasher and doing the ironing without all the other gumph. You probably think it's about Dad, but it's actually only half about Dad as I'm sitting here listening to my little Smudgelet coughing himself hoarse as he tries to sleep and wishing I could magic this cough away for him. Tiddles has been poorly as well today, with a RADA-qualifying performance over a "two 8-pm bedtimes in a row" headache which was seriously amplified by "Smudgelet and Grandad are getting all the attention and it's about time you paid a bit more to me"-itis. (Spot the sympathetic mummy! And yes, I do feel guilty, but if you saw him dancing around in the mummy-isn't-looking moments, you'd lack sympathy too). And of course, there's a large part of me that really wants to go round and spend the evening with my Dad.
I hope they do take him in tomorrow. We've been today to get his blood test done (having to suffer the guilt of leaving a poorly 13-year-old alone in bed while we did so, in the absence of a babysitter) and I called in on the third-floor ward to check on the routine for tomorrow. After I'd run up and down the stairs to the ward, Dad suddenly said "Did you think to ask them about the mattress?", so off I went again. Dad has a special mattress from the hospice to make his bed bearable to sleep on and I was to enquire whether the hospital could provide one. Needless to say, the answer is "Any chance you could bring your own?". I wonder, when they send him home after the op, whether they'll tell him to "pick up his bed and walk".
Maybe I shouldn't laugh, but I've been thinking about the reaction of the landlady at the pub when Dad had his seizure on Saturday. She came to mind when I was planning to take Dad and the boys out for lunch today, before the boys were both too ill to go, and I pondered whether to go back to the same place! I think she'd have had a fit :D She was kind and concerned, but I couldn't help laughing as she'd been concerned how the ambulance men were going to get Dad out through the tiny front door so went and opened the double doors at the back, returning only to find they'd already gone and were loading Dad into the ambulance. Totally flustered, she forgot to enquire how Dad was and simply ranted about how the ambulance men had taken no notice of her opening the other doors for them, even though she'd told them to take him out of the back way. (And no, it wasn't to keep him out of sight as going through the front was actually more discrete as we were sitting just by the door). I was forced to giggle, too, when she misheard my brother speaking to the control centre when he rang for the ambulance. Dad has a Triage Bypass card which allows him to get emergency treatment without having to go through a host of questions from a nurse first. The landlady (not listening to the conversation at all, of course) went into the lounge and declared "He's only just had a heart bypass operation, too - no wonder he's so ill !!!"
Mind you, the old fraud managed two trips to church on Sunday and a ride out to the church coffee morning on Monday. I was helping. I made three cups of coffee and drank two, and washed up four cups so I am sure M appreciated my help :D