Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  “Anything over the speed limit is unacceptable! Is that clear? If you can’t obey the speed limit and I hear anything else about speeding, you will not drive. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That time I was innocent—of speeding. I had not been on that road after school at that time that whole week. Instead, I’d taken a few detours and made stops at other places each day after school. For instance, one day I’d taken a couple of girlfriends over to Methodist College to watch a baseball game because my boyfriend at the time was the pitcher for the visiting team from Elon College. I did a quick analysis.

  I’d already been counseled about coming straight home from school unless I had permission not to, so I faced possible loss of driving privileges. I evaluated my defense options. What did I do? I copped to speeding, a first-time offense. As my father taught me, one must choose her battles.

  I want to make clear that my father was not the Great Santini or anything like the stereotypical military mean man portrayed in too many books and movies. I also want to stress that most of the fathers of other military brats I knew were not. He wasn’t a hothead. His expectations were not unfair, and his punishments were not physical. There were rules. He made sure we knew them. It was up to us to follow them or accept responsibility for not doing so.

  I seldom saw him act in anger or raise his voice. He meted out punishment relative to the crime. For my brothers and me, Dad’s displeasure or disappointment was the worst penalty. What he thought of me mattered more than anyone else’s opinion. In my heart and mind, Dad held the highest rank in my chain of command.

  I can count on one hand the number of times he has let me drive if he’s going to be in the car with me. Two times I was driving him to the hospital. The other two were when I followed him to drop off his car at the mechanic and had to drive him home and back when his car was ready. I fully expected him to ask me for my keys. But I guess he figured it would be silly to ask me for the keys to my own car so he could drive it. Most of the time he gets around this problem by asking the FOGs to take him.

  There have been a few incidents when he’s been distracted or tired. He’ll drive a little too close to the center lane or off on the shoulder. I’ve learned not to scream, but I ride defensively keeping my eye one the road, watching for other drivers and making sure to point out things that might be a problem.

  One night in the car, I was fiddling with my phone and heard him start to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked him.

  “We were almost killed at that intersection. There was no screaming so I thought you might be in shock.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Nothing! Why do you always think I did something?”

  I’ve gotten better at not screaming. I’ve decided that it won’t do me a bit of good and might make things worse. One night, Dad and I went out a little later than we realized. Not only did it turn dark on our way home, but we got caught in a torrential downpour. Visibility was nil except for the flashing police and ambulance lights we saw in the distance just short of our house.

  “I’m going to take a detour,” Dad said, “I’ll turn around up here.”

  Thinking he meant into the parking lot of The Dollar Store a few yards up, I said, “Good idea,” but Dad started to take an immediate hard left right in the middle of the road.

  “Jesus, Dad!” I yelled.

  “What? I’m just going to go into the parking lot here and turn around,” he said.

  “There’s no driveway, Dad,” I was not yelling.

  THUMP

  “Oh. This is bad,” he said as cars headed toward our stalled SUV standing horizontal across the road (with me on the side they’d hit, I might add). “You know it’s hard for some people to see in the dark and with this weather … people like me,” and he started laughing. I did not join him.

  I continue to be watchful and to prepare myself for the fact that it may well require, despite all my hope otherwise, my brothers and me to push Dad to hand over the car keys. Taking the car keys is not a hill I choose to die on alone. I know I am better prepared to have that difficult conversation now than I would have been previously. Yet I continue to hope that Dad’s typical awareness and common sense will prevail and that I won’t have to rewrite that part of my original script.

  CHAPTER 25

  Medical Advisory Team

  AFTER ABOUT FOUR YEARS of living with Dad, I settled in, and Dad seemed used to my being there. I responded well to the imposed structure of his life. We fell into a regular pattern and continued to share stories and experiences, gaining new perspectives about one another and others in our family, as well as people we have known.

  I appreciate that it has not always been this way, that it wasn’t always easy. One of the hardest areas has been around matters of health. For the most part, Dad is an excellent patient. He has regular doctor and dentist appointments. He keeps them. He follows whatever he is told to do and, thank heavens, I think he lucked into a fantastic team of doctors—primary physician, cardiologist, and dermatologist.

  When he comes back, I always ask what the doctor said. He always gives me vague answers. “No change.” Or “I’m doing great for someone who’s in his eighties.” I interpret this as he didn’t ask any questions, or he doesn’t want to tell me. When the doctor changes a course of treatment or a prescription, I ask if the doctor told him why.

  “Hell, no,” he tells me.

  “Dad, did you ask?”

  “Why do I need to ask him? He’s the only one who needs to know why. I just do what he tells me.”

  He does know what all his pills are for, though not always which pill is for which “thing.”

  One night I asked him if he had any antacids. He said, “Oh, I have a pill for that. Take it for a few days and see if it works. I have tons of these.”

  I was in so much pain, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take one or two until I got to the doctor myself. I looked at the bottle. I didn’t recognize the name, but it said to take one a day. I figured that wouldn’t kill me. I’d take one for the evening and then call the doctor’s office in the morning.

  “Is this generic, Dad?”

  “What? Oh, yeah.”

  About thirty minutes later it occurred to me to look the pill up. I pulled up a browser and searched.

  “Dad! This isn’t an antacid. This is for hypertension and angina.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m pretty sure you have hypertension, and no one wants angina, believe me.”

  I begin to look at his medications and research what they were for. Then I went to the pharmacy and got two more pillboxes, each for a week’s worth of pills.

  I held up the new pillboxes and said, “Dad, I got you two extra pill boxes. I can fill them up for you so that you always have at least two more ready to go.”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  Not too long after that conversation I went away for a week. On the drive back from the airport, just as I crossed the bridge, I called as I always did. He didn’t sound good.

  “I’ve been sick.”

  “I can hear that, Dad. You sound croupy and weak. Have you been to the doctor?”

  “No, if I don’t get better, I’ll go.”

  He hadn’t been feeling well for the week before I left and had promised to go if things didn’t get better. I calculated that this was headed into his third week. He sounded so ill that I said, “Dad, when I get home, we’re going to the emergency room.”

  “No, we’re not,” he said. “I’ll call the doctor tomorrow.”

  “It’s Memorial Day tomorrow,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, I’ll go Tuesday.”

  I didn’t want to push him, so I waited until I got home.

  When I saw Dad, he looked pale—almost gray. I felt his forehead.

  “Dad, you have a fever, you’re weak, and this has been going on too long. We’re going to the emergency room.”

  “No, we’re not,” he said. “I’ll call
the doctor Tuesday.”

  I decided to try a tactic I used with my children.

  “It’s a holiday weekend, so it might be better not to go tonight. Let’s go first thing in the morning. Early before anyone has any car accidents on their way home from the beach.”

  “That sounds liked a good idea,” he said.

  He went to bed that night and I stayed up to make sure he was okay. Just about the time I would head across the hall to see if he were breathing, I’d hear him cough so I knew he was still alive at least.

  The next morning, I was sitting in the den when he came downstairs. He had showered, he was dressed, his hair was combed, and he was carrying his toiletry kit under his arm.

  “Let’s go. I’m ready. I think they’ll probably keep me,” he said.

  I drove him over to the hospital. He was having a hard time breathing, and I could hear the fluid in his lungs as he sat next to me in the car. After we parked in the lot near the ER entrance, I walked ahead of him to open the door.

  “Dad, I’m doing the talking. Don’t say anything.” He just looked at me.

  I pushed open the door and a nurse looked up at me. “I have an eighty-seven-year-old man coming in. His pulse is thready and I hear fluid in his lungs.”

  The nurse came around the reception desk with a wheelchair. Dad didn’t argue. He sat down. They took him right in. A nurse did a workup and the doctor on duty came in.

  After X-rays, they concluded that Dad had a slight case of pneumonia but were more concerned about his vitals. His oxygen was low and his heartbeat irregular. They admitted him. I knew he felt extremely ill because he didn’t argue. He was in good spirits, kidding around as usual, but put up no resistance to staying the night. I stayed with Dad until he was settled and learned that they would put him through a bunch of tests the next morning. I went home to let my brothers know and to call my girls.

  My brother asked if he should catch a flight up and I said not to until we knew more from the tests.

  I called my oldest daughter, Rachel, before I called her sisters.

  “I’ll be out as soon as I can,” she said.

  “Oh, honey, they’ll be doing tests tomorrow. Why don’t you wait and see what they say first …,” but she interrupted me.

  “Okay, but I’ll be there the day after tomorrow. By midday,” she insisted. I figured we’d have enough information by then.

  I was grateful it was a holiday; it gave me time to get a few things done so that when I called into my office on Tuesday morning to say I’d be out for a day or two, no one would inherit too big a mess. Then I headed back to the hospital.

  Dad was sitting up in bed. His vitals had not improved. I watched the monitor on his bed. The nurse explained that he was in congestive heart failure. I didn’t hear her as she explained where they wanted his oxygen levels and heart rate to be. My countenance was calm. I felt myself nodding, but worried that I would faint. I remembered the last time I thought my father was dying.

  It was a holiday weekend then, too. My father was at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before leaving for Korea. I was up for a visit and reading the newspaper in the living room when my father came into the living room from outside. He was clutching his chest. He was perspiring and looked ashen. Though calm, he fell onto the sofa and said, “Get an ambulance.”

  I ran to the phone in the kitchen, picked it up and said, “Get an ambulance over here. I think my father’s having a heart attack!”

  Then I hung up and looked at my father. I realized that I hadn’t given them our address or my father’s name.

  “Good one,” my father said.

  I stood there immobilized and so panicked I didn’t have the brainpower to remember to tell the ambulance where to go. Dad seemed more amused about it than worried though. In a moment I heard the ambulance.

  “They know where every call on this post comes from,” Dad said as though to answer my unasked question. They took him to the hospital in the ambulance, and by morning they determined it was a hiatal hernia, not a heart attack.

  I laughed a little as I thought how that episode added to the stories about my fear of blood. I was glad Rachel would be with me the next day.

  Rachel arrived as promised and if I had any concerns that Dad would have the medical advocacy any patient needed, I stopped having them. I stood back and watched with wonder as she familiarized herself with the room, introduced herself to the nurses, and monitored what they did—and then I noticed her walk out to the desk.

  “What were you telling them?” I asked when she returned.

  “I gave them a “Post-it Note” with my name and cell phone number and let them know that they needed to call me about what was happening. I told them to put it right in his chart.”

  I looked over at my father. If I had done that, I was sure he’d have been annoyed. But he was totally fine with Rachel taking over. In fact, quite amused. Every now and then a nurse would ask him something and he would point to Rachel and say, “You’d better talk to her.”

  In no time, everyone began talking to Rachel along with Dad. I was so relieved.

  I put Rachel on the phone when we called my brother. She spoke to her uncle and filled him in on everything. I marveled at how she had managed to collect so much more information that I would have felt comfortable or thought to ask for. Some kind of advocate I was.

  We were there the next day when the cardiologist came in to see Dad. He informed us that Dad’s heart was functioning at about 50 percent and that because of that, blood was pooling and they were concerned about clots. This precluded any of the procedures that might improve things for fear he would throw a clot and have a major stroke.

  Rachel looked at the doctor. “So what options are possible?” she asked.

  “Unfortunately, in this situation, there is nothing available that wouldn’t put him at risk for a major heart attack or stroke,” he told her. Then he looked at my father.

  “We’ll stabilize you, get your oxygen levels up. Maybe send you home with some oxygen.”

  I said nothing, but Rachel looked at the doctors and said firmly, but sweetly, “Oh. There has to be another option.”

  Then she looked at my father and said, “We’ll get you stabilized, and then we’re taking you across the bridge. We’ll get a second opinion at the Heart Center at INOVA in Virginia. It’s not far from my house, so it will be easy for us to get back and forth.”

  The doctor said nothing. My father said nothing. Rachel smiled a lovely smile at the doctor and said, “I’ve got to go make a call. I’ll be back.”

  I walked over and sat by Dad’s bed.

  “If I need to have oxygen, it’s over,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “I mean it. I can’t play golf with a tank of oxygen.”

  I thought he was trying to joke, but when I looked at him, he was serious. He seemed to be telling me that if living required oxygen, his life was over.

  I said something he used to say to me when I was a child, worried or afraid, and anticipating the worst: “Let’s wait and see what happens, Dad.” Then I added, “You can’t go anywhere right now. I don’t have a plan B.” I laughed and he grinned at me. It was true. I couldn’t bear for him to die. That was not part of my plan.

  I went to look for Rachel. She was keeping in touch with her office and her family. We decided to grab a sandwich in the café.

  “Look,” she said, “if they are going to say there are no options, it doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion.”

  “If he’ll go along with it,” I said.

  “Oh, he’ll go along with it,” she mumbled with a mouth full of chicken salad. “He has no choice. We’ll convince him.”

  After lunch, the doctor came back in. “There may be one thing we can try. We can use a camera and check to see if there are any clots present. If there are, it’s no go. But if there aren’t, we can try shocking your heart back into regular rhythm.” He said they’d do what they could to
schedule Dad for Friday morning, otherwise it would be Monday.

  That afternoon we called Jim to let him know. He said he’d book a flight for Friday. Rachel had to return home that morning, but my youngest daughter, Jane, traveled from New York City to DC so that my other daughter, Sharon, could drive her out. They were able to swing by the airport and pick up their uncle on the way.

  Jim and the girls wouldn’t be there in time for the operation, so I went over to the hospital to be with Dad when they came to get him. The doctor said I could follow them down, and that there was a waiting room near the operating room. It did not seem long at all, and suddenly I saw them wheel Dad out. It was over so fast; I was sure that meant the procedure didn’t work. I remained calm with an expression I hoped conveyed, “No sweat.”

  As they rolled him by the waiting room, Dad looked over at me. I smiled at him. He lifted his right hand and gave me the thumbs up sign.

  “It worked?” I cried out, louder than was probably appropriate for a cardiology waiting room.

  The doctor smiled and nodded. Dad was taken to the recovery room for a short while before they took him back to his room to rest. I took the opportunity to go home so I could be there when Jim and my girls arrived.

  After updates, we all rode over to the hospital. Dad was in good spirits and happy to see his son and granddaughters. He was still tired so shooed us out of him room and said he’d see us the next day.

  That evening I relaxed for the first time since Dad was admitted to the hospital. We laughed and told stories, and I enjoyed watching my daughters with my brother. We didn’t see enough of one another, perhaps, but I was grateful that my children knew their aunts and uncles on both sides of their family. The regard they had for one another was evident.

  We took turns going to the hospital so that we could get other things done during times someone else was taking a shift. At one point I was in Dad’s room with my daughters when his primary care physician came in to visit. He sat in the window and talked to Dad. We began to ask questions. I noticed that my two daughters and I had him cornered. One sat next to him on the window seat, the other at the foot of the bed. I was near the door.