FraserWords

I’VE been at my sick father’s house, listening anxiously to his ragged breathing, not really knowing quite what to do for the best – much as he must have listened anxiously to my ragged baby breathing, not knowing quite what to do for the best.

So the role reversal is now complete. I bundled his bony baby weight in my arms, raised him on his pillows and kissed him. Child becomes man, man becomes child and all that.

Now I must protect him, and so I will. ‘We can admit him to Derriford,’ said his doctor this morning, but I could hear the great big ‘no’ in his voice, and I echoed it fervently. Dad, my sister and I have long known how things should end, when end they must, if we have a choice: in his house, in his place.

‘After all,’ said the doctor, to his great credit agreeing with us wholeheartedly, ‘that’s where he caught the chest infection in the first place…’

Well, yes. Dad had to go in on Friday because he might have broken a hip. Turned out to be a painful mixture of arthritis and extreme old age (he’s 86, after all), but by the time Derriford had worked that out the damage had been done and he’d caught his bug.  I suppose that seeing as the Health Service has kept him alive all these years, it’s got the right to kill him. Just seems to go against the grain a bit, that’s all.

I know I’ve said this all before. I know that wonderful, caring, life-saving, life-enhancing things are done at our medico-industrial hospital complexes. I know that brilliant and loving people like our Almost Sainted Brother and our Spiritual Guide, the good Reverend Sister, will move heaven and earth to make the establishments work for patients. But by Christ, these are grim Satanic mills of medicine. Multi-storey car parks, flashing lights, Pizza Hut concessions, bright metal, glowing plastic, fizzing neon, uniformed security guards, shuffling smokers, grim-faced car park attendants, stressed staff, bloodied patients oozing through dressings lying unattended on beds in the corridors, and all those thousands and thousands and thousands of people, milling about, coughing, crying, demanding. Solve it, and our Brother will be sainted and our Reverend Sister will be Archbishop of Canterbury. Both of which would be good things.

Anyway. This is short tonight, because I’m tired. What will happen now? I don’t know, but my father is a tough old bastard. He’s survived 86 years on this rock with half a heart string and one-and-a-half lungs, scarred with asbestos and tuberculosis, and it’s going to take a mean old hospital-borne bug to carry him off – and if it does, well, as he said, after a long, good life, he’s not going to be asking for his money back at the Pearly Gates.

Me? Many of us have faced, or will face, this, twice. For the second time, I am twice a parent because from both ends of life, eyes focus hopefully on me. Give me strength to be better than I am, and as kind as they want me to be.