Sunday, March 24, 2013

days with daddy

my fridays with daddy have turned into mondays and other days. it is a roller coaster, and though i wish i could find a more literary term to describe it, that seems apt. how you begin the long slow crawl to what you think is the top, then all things ricochet, up down sideways and backward. then up, down again.

i remember the first roller coaster i ever rode, in myrtle beach back when i was a senior in high school. that trip, like this one with daddy, was all about uncertainty, and it did not end as i would have wanted. i was supposed to love riding the roller coaster, but i didn't. i was scared but i didn't want anyone to know it, so i got back on again.

that's what you do, isn't it? you get back on and see if the next ride will be different. at least that's how it is for me right now. i'm willing to ride again. because i keep thinking one of these days soon it's going to be a joy ride with daddy, and not the scary one we have been on.

years ago, my father and i took a joy ride. it was Ash Wednesday, and when i was little, daddy took wednesday afternoons off. my brother and sister were in school but i was 4, so the two of us set out in a cold rain to ride an hour or so to visit my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. as we drove north, the rain turned to ice, and before long, snow covered the road and the telephone poles leaned toward one another, held up only by the power lines.

i could hardly be a reliable narrator recalling a memory when i was 4, but when i think of that day, i see the wipers swishing hard as the whole world turned white, daddy leaning into the dash, his hands gripping the steering wheel. we didn't turn back. daddy kept that car on the road and somehow we reached my grandparent's house. when we arrived, the lights were out, and we found them huddled around a pot belly stove in an upstairs bedroom, trying to stay warm. 

it would turn out to be a legendary storm, the Ash Wednesday Storm, a northeaster that battered the outer banks and caused damaged that took years to repair.

now daddy and i are in the middle of a different kind of storm, but in many ways it's the same: he's driving on icy roads, i'm holding on to the seat for fear of slipping.

on the first day of this week, i sit by his side, watching him breathe in and out, look at his blood pressure (good) and try to cool off from beneath the hot yellow gown and purple gloves i have to wear to guard against infection. he is hard to wake, though when i left him a few days before, he stayed awake for much of the day.

so the only certainty is that there is none. 

except maybe in the cafeteria. my father has been housed in the hospital now for 47 days. and he has many, many days left. so sometimes when they say it's time to do this or that to him, i end up in the cafeteria, alone, watching, trying to eat something. 

the man next to me speaks into his phone, which he lays on the table as he eats a very large salad. his words could be my own: sleeping mostly, i don't think he knows i'm here. concern. sleeping. update. all words i have used myself in the past day. finally he ends his conversation with 'drink plenty of fluids and get some rest.' 

i imagine he is talking to his child, updating him or her on the grandfather's life now in ICU, or somewhere on the floors above where we sit. i say a prayer for them, quietly, because i know what he and his family are going through.

looking around, i recognize: the young woman wearing a beautiful Muslim scarf. she is on daddy's lift team, comes around every few hours to shift him in his bed and who now calls him Pop B, just like she is a grandchild. the hospitalist is there, the one when daddy first arrived those many days ago. he saunters up to the cash register, just as he did that first day to daddy's room... sauntered, hands in his pockets, posture that made me feel he didn't care very much about his patient. one thing my daddy doesn't do, never did, is saunter.

everyone else caring for daddy is engaged and concerned, wanting not to pass the time but to make this critically ill man better. and so i tell the nurses and the therapists and the doctors about where he practiced and how long, try to paint a picture of this man who to them is an very sick and aging man. a man can't speak for himself right now.

i know nothing of medicine, but the longer i stay here with him, the more i just want to somehow to story him well, if that makes sense. telling his story, somehow, has to make him better. right? 

friday comes, and it is once again my turn to sit. when i arrive, they've shifted daddy's bed into a sort of chair, and he has the paper in his lap. he wears his glasses for the first time in these 47 days, looks so much like himself that i'm startled. i've brought him a soft ball to squeeze because right now he can't use his hands or arms very well, and squeezing the ball will help him grip the wheel again, navigate this icy road. i drop the ball into his hand and say 'squeeze' and he looks at me and does just that. 

behind me, players in the ncaa tournament travel back and forth across the floor, tossing another ball, and every now and then daddy looks up. his team is not in the running, but mine is, and i pretend for a moment to be daddy's coach. we work with the balls, he nodding his head, squeezing and dropping, moving his arms just enough to show me he can. i hold my phone in front of him, showing him a picture of his newest great-grandchild and ask him to hand her the ball. he moves it over and places it in front of the picture, smiling at her, his lips forming the thin line i have known my whole life.

'remember the story of the little engine that could?' i ask him, and he nods. 'that book is as old as you are, daddy.' he was two when it was published. might have read it as boy. 

ok, daddy, i think you can, i say, urging him to try one more task — to touch his finger to his nose. i'm allowed to lift his elbow but he has to do the rest. we try but he can't quite make it, so take a time out. a few minutes later we try again, and i say: i think i can i think i can... until his narrow finger meets that nose.

so much of his recovery now depends on this kind of work. this knowing that he has inside him what he needs to keep from slipping back down the icy road. what he needs to get well.

by the end of the day he can put the ball in my hand and pick it back up. 

have to hit the road, daddy, i say, exhausted myself from being his coach. i'll be back on monday, ready to let him steer once again, while i sit holding onto the seat.




writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

fridays with daddy

"Dr. Dad"
excerpt: June 15, 1997 ©susan byrum rountree

My father is an amateur magician. With a sleight of hand, he pulls coins from behind the ears of grandchildren, performs card tricks and watches for our disbelief. He separates inseparable rings. 
Another trick he knows is making figures from balloons, those thin ones that give the rest of us headaches when we try to blow them up. He twists them into dachshunds, swords or party hats in a blink. He learned this grandfather skill when I was 10 years old, the year he almost died. 
 It was on his 39th birthday — just the age that I am now — when a fever brought on by a lung abscess was draining life from his weakened body. 
 I remember it as a cold day, Dec. 2, when my mother took my brother  and sister and me to Norfolk, where Daddy was in the hospital, to  celebrate his birthday. (author's note: we think now it was Dec. 3.)
 Our celebration turned to a watch, as the three of us waited together in a cold side room. Then one-by-one they took us to where he lay packed in ice, hardly recognizable. I remember oddly dim fluorescent lights, nurses standing in dark corners and doctors wearing white coats and grim faces. 
 I'd never been afraid of hospitals before. I'd walked the hospital corridor many times with my father, heard his whistling from behind delivery room doors, wondering, as I watched the shadows move on the floor, what medical magic he was performing. I'd stood with him by the nursery window, gazing at the bundles there, wondering really, how babies come to be. 
 But on those trips, Daddy was always the man in the white coat with the stethoscope draped around his shoulders, silver and gold pens dipping deep into his chest pocket. 
 My father is the one folks in Scotland Neck call "Doc." He's the one man here who knows just the trick to cure what ails you. But on that day in 1967, with his body splintered with tubes, it was the city doctors  who had the answers. They took part of his lung, and within hours the fever left, and he was sitting up in bed and eating. By Christmas Eve he was home, and soon after he was blowing up those snake-like balloons, to strengthen his lungs. He returned to work, the direct result of hundreds of prayers and perfect medical timing. 

march 1, 2013

the thin red line that holds a stranger's blood loops around like one of those balloons Daddy used to blow up, drawing circles on the white blanket as it makes its way into my father's body. i watch, wondering what might happen if the line breaks. because it feels like my life with Daddy is just a bit broken as he lies here, his 23rd day in the hospital.

i hold his hand and share my day, pretending we are sitting in the family room, with him resting and listening from his favorite chair. though in truth, I'm reading the monitor that now gauges his every breath. even as he nods off and on, i think he knows what's going on. he is a doctor, even in the middle of this crippling illness that seized his body three weeks ago.

i think about how one day in early winter, i took him to have a test that required sedation. when he woke, he marveled at the number of people in what my car dealer grandfather called the back shop. where the nuts and bolts are put together, where the job is done. awake after a procedure designed for him not to remember, Daddy sparkled, like the Daddy i have known for so long. he was in his medical back shop, a place he had clearly missed.

'he must have to do a lot of these procedures to pay for all of this staff!' Daddy said then. i could almost feel the energy he felt, just sitting there watching the act of diagnosis and healing taking place. this was his life, taking care of people, trying to figure out what was wrong with them. i couldn't help thinking that if we could put him in a chair just to watch it all again, that would be his happy life. 

today he is the patient once again. 23 days. 23. if he could only count the number of people who have worked so hard to help him make it to day 23, he would first be thankful. then he would certainly be figuring the price tag.

i'm spending fridays with Daddy, holding his hand, asking questions about all those tubes. he is just about well from what brought him here — that pneumonia — the same thing that put him in the hospital all those years ago. but now he's trying to recover from what's happened to him since he came here. it seems an impossible struggle.

on one of my days with him, Daddy kept trying to wash his hands, bedridden as he was. so i put some hand sanitizer into my hands covered his with it. he kneaded his fingers together the same way i have seen him do thousands of times in my years as his daughter.

"what are you doing?" i asked him.

"trying to clean up the mess you've made," he said, and i silently checked off a litany of things he might be talking about, though i never said them aloud. that was pretty much the last thing he was able to say to me. before the respiratory arrest caused him to be put on a ventilator.

in the past three weeks my family's world has dipped and peaked so often it's felt like riding the tilt-a-whirl. we thought he was dying twice. and yet, he rallies. 

prayer plays a huge role in his recovery.

today i have been reading to him from my little book, the only thing in my bag except Better Homes & Garden. Daddy is not one to email, but just before Christmas he emailed me about one of my blog posts, saying simply: 'one of your best, from you favorite reader, with love, gvb.' a treasure.

so i feel safe in reading from my own pile of words. since he has lost his words at the moment, he can't complain! i start with a story about giving my daughter a bath for the first time. it's really more about my mother than me, and i can see the edges of his mouth turn up slightly when i mention how much Mama loves a scalding bath. i read to him about her many hats, about my son starting kindergarten, stories i have long ago forgotten.

here is how the day goes. i read, he nods off, he wakes up, i read some more. repeat. repeat. and then some more.

two weeks ago, on another Friday, they told us he might not survive the night. that night, i lay awake, imagining our world without our Daddy in it. i dreamed that we are on a bus with my brother driving, and instead of going forward, we plummeted into a cavern in the jungle, thinking we all will die. but though in many dreams like this i wake before we hit bottom, this time i don't, and we don't all die but move back up toward the light.

by morning, Daddy opens his eyes when we visit, still holding on to the world a little longer.
+++

it's afternoon and Daddy is awake. i read on, not knowing what else to do, and it seems that my stories were making him sad. (is this what i have done to every reader but didn't fully know it? i thought i was funny!) 

finally i leaf through to find a story about how i still believe in Santa Claus. my husband is there, playing the grinch. yet i am, ever hopeful that one day, Santa will visit me once again. i wrote that story when i was 37, but it holds as true to me now, too. 

waiting for Santa Claus. for that Christmas Eve when i run home and find Daddy sitting on on his side of the bed in my parents' room, the only time, really, that Santa gave me exactly what i wished for. 


writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.