Bracing for the Fall of My Second Tower
After losing my mother to dementia, I’ve spent years learning to live with grief. Now, as my 91-year-old father faces a life-threatening health crisis, I’m forced to confront the reality of losing him too—and the fragile line between holding on and letting go.
It's been a bit over four years since my mother died from Lewy Body Dementia. The first six months I lived in denial. I acted like nothing had changed. I dove into work headlong to try to distract myself. That was effective for a while until work started falling apart.
Then I realized things had changed.
Society, as a whole, was emerging from COVID. Businesses started opening up again and began hiring for the first time in a couple of years. I lost half my staff that summer as workers jumped for better opportunities.
I ran myself into the ground. I tried to compensate by putting in even more hours, spending more time at work. At one stretch in my final month, I worked 23 straight days.
But then it all hit me at once. When you are at your weakest is when you are most vulnerable. That's what happened to me. When my work life began falling apart and that wall came down, I saw the rest of my life was in ruins and I hadn't taken time to rebuild.
Most importantly, I hadn't addressed Ground Zero – my mother's passing. It left a void in my life like losing the Twin Towers did on Manhattan's skyline. While New Yorkers were resilient and rebuilt new towers, I had chosen to put a curtain over my missing Twin Tower.
But the curtain was bound to fall. And I had to face my new "skyline" for the first time.
It has taken three-plus years of therapy to deal with that grief and the subsequent major depression that I fell into. I am fully recovered? Hell no. I've made some progress, but my depression revealed underlying layers I didn't know existed – like a tornado ripping shingles off a roof.
I realized my whole adult life I’d been putting aluminum siding over a damaged home. Everyone thought I was easygoing, unfazed, happy-go-lucky. So did I.
Until my mother died. Until work fell apart. Until society became increasingly selfish, unempathetic, hateful, and violent. Until we elected (re-elected!) a president who embodied all those abysmal traits and fanned them like a flame throughout our country and the world.
But, yeah, three years later and I have taken several baby steps to learn how to live with this new reality. I am still out of work and in no condition to return. It has taken me all this time and effort to choose to keep holding onto the rope of life, but I am not ready to climb it just yet.
Just the opposite, actually. These last couple of months I have sort of "relapsed."
It has to do with my father's health. Yesterday, I had to call for an ambulance to take him to the hospital.
I live upstairs from him and he had called me on my phone at 5 a.m. He was having trouble breathing. When I went downstairs, I found him, in his pajamas, sitting on his recliner in the living room. He was gasping for breath. His eyes were watering.
A month earlier
I had recently bought a finger oximeter to measure his oxygen. Four weeks ago, I had to call an ambulance for him because he fainted in the middle of a conversation we were having outside at our picnic table. His eyes rolled back in his head. He started foaming at the mouth. He was totally unresponsive.
He spent a couple of days in the hospital. His oxygen levels were in the mid- to upper 80s without supplemental oxygen. They wouldn't discharge him until he could show he could stay above 90 without the oxygen mask.
All the other tests indicated no stroke, heart attack, or embolism. They discharged him and said he fainted due to dehydration. Tell him to drink more water.
Back to now
That's when I bought an oximeter so we could check his oxygen at home. So yesterday morning, I grabbed that and the wrist blood pressure monitor before I made a decision to either take him to the emergency room myself or call for an ambulance.
His blood pressure was good, but the oximeter was reading 67.
There's no way. This $15 piece of shit, I thought to myself.
I put it on my finger. It read 97. I put it back on his finger – 67. I put back on my finger – 96.
Shit! Maybe this is right after all.
That's when my father asked me what it said. I told him it was reading 67, but that couldn't be right. That's when he told me that's about the number he has been getting the last couple of days.
I decided to call the ambulance right away. I wasn't going to take any chances of him passing out in the car, plus I knew he needed oxygen right away (no, he has not been prescribed supplemental oxygen for home... not yet).
The paramedics showed up and they got a reading of 70 on their oximeter. They immediately put an oxygen mask on my dad and he began breathing more comfortably, like someone surfacing above water after being trapped underneath.
When they got to the hospital, they started doing all the tests. I got the results simultaneously on my phone via his patient portal. I was comforted, last month, when I saw the lab results that all his bloodwork looked within the limits.
Not this time. His CO2 in his blood was almost off the chart. His oxygen in his blood was extremely low. His chest scan showed fluid around the lungs and some other scarring or something that was much worse than the one last month they were comparing it to.
I plugged all the screenshots of the lab results into ChatGPT. Now I know that these AI models are flawed and you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but there are also many grains of truth interspersed in there. It can be very helpful when it comes time to ask questions of doctors.
ChatGPT (I call it "Chad" – cute, right?) analyzed the information and told me that – considering my dad's age of 91 – all signs pointed to possible congestive heart or respiratory failure. It said this was a very serious situation.
I asked it to give to me straight – no sugar-coating, I can handle it – on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being "life-threatening," how serious is his condition right now? It thought for a few seconds, then responded 8.
That's when it hit me. Holy shit – this could be it!
The difference between my mom and dad's circumstances
It got me thinking about here we go again. It is my mother all over again, and I had just started, maybe, getting over that, and I know I was/am facing this all over again. I'm not ready.
The more I started thinking about, the more I realized that my dad's situation is vastly different from my mother's. My mother's dementia was a slow, brutal process to endure, but at least I had time to prepare myself, mentally. Maybe that is why I was able to carry on like nothing happened for six months after her passing.
My mother's body was strong as an ox, but it was her brain that failed her. From the neck down, my mother was always in great shape – great heart (in more ways than one), lungs, kidneys... everything). It was from the neck up that was what killed her.
With my father, it is the opposite that is happening. His mind is sharp. Every day, it seems like he has a different story to tell from when he was younger. He can remember a kid's name from when he was 10 years old that he had a fight with in the schoolyard. Or a teacher's name who used to slap him on the wrist with a ruler.
It is, however, his body that is failing him. Heck – he is 91. Hearts aren't meant to beat forever. Like my father has said a lot in recent years, his warranty expired a long time ago.
But, still, I wasn't prepared for this.
Maybe I've been so focused on recovering from losing my mother that I haven't given enough consideration to losing my father.
It's hard to blame myself, though.
Until six months ago, he was still driving himself everywhere. Just this week, my brother took him to buy grapes so my father could make his homemade wine he has been making for decades. He has a shed, specifically, for that purpose.
He has always been able to rebound. But this time just feels different. "Chad" had a good point that this is now his second hospital visit in as many months. At 91, your body doesn't recover from setbacks like this like when you were 18. Even if you go home, you have suffered irreparable damage to your organs.
I had to ask "Chad" – This all sounds very bad. Again, give it to me straight – does he have only a year or two to live?
Chad thought again for a few seconds before telling me to worry, first, about him recovering from this very serious situation. Then, if he does go home, two years is very optimistic based on all the information I had given it. The likelihood is more like three to six months.
Again, I take what AI says with a grain of salt and sort through it all for some semblances of truth. The bottom line is that my dad is not going to live into his mid- to late 90s.
It dawned on me that he may have just celebrated his last birthday. He may have enjoyed his last summer.
The house feels so empty and quiet without him.
It is something I need to start getting used to.
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