My Inner Socialist Leaks Out

Last Monday night my dad’s friend called, said he wasn’t doing too good, thought family ought to get involved. He lives about an hour and a half away so I drove down, found him … well, I don’t remember how I found him. He was doing okay, just having a very hard time getting around and was a little out of it for not having eaten or had any water for awhile. He was coughing terribly and was a little disoriented from this and from general dehydration.

He didn’t want to eat much so I fixed us something simple, I forget what (some journalist, huh, I forget everything), but he was healthy enough to hobble into the kitchen and instruct me in the construction of a proper gin and tonic. Just like his mother, he prefers not to mix the Tanqueray but just use Gordon’s for it. Looked so good I had one too. We stayed up late watching Galaxy Quest and being as it took half an hour to go from couch to toilet and another half hour to go from toilet to bed because his knees hurt so much, basic activities took forever and I finally hit the fold-out couch around two.

Slept in till seven and from that point Tuesday is a blur. His knees and general alertness worsened while his cough didn’t get any better. It became increasingly difficult to stand, and his knees hurt so much to bend he couldn’t really get into bed. So he spent a lot of time sitting on the edge of his bed, half-asleep, maintaining balance semi-subconsciously, while I busied myself getting fresh water or apple sauce or whatever. Again, I can’t remember, it’s a blur.

By early afternoon he was unable to get up. But he had to go to the bathroom as much as ever. So we devised a technique using a bucket and a towel, and it worked all right. Fortunate that men have plumbing that assists with such an arrangement. But clearly this was a temporary measure. By mid-evening I was beginning to see the situation was not tenable. He could not get off the edge of his bed. Indeed, after relieving himself, he was far enough off the edge he was in danger of sliding off. I had to stand on the bed behind him and lift him up by the armpits to pull him away from the edge. He weighs two thirty. I was thankful I’d been working out a little, though my injured elbow tendon (never did get around to blogging that hilarious story) wasn’t well served by the effort. We also tried several times to get him swiveled around and supine, but this too became more difficult. Forty five minutes it took to get there, by which time he needed to sit up and go again.

If you’ve ever cared for someone who is physically unable to care for himself, then it makes sense to you that by the time I got him lying down far enough from the edge so he wouldn’t roll off and also by the way not needing to go to the bathroom again, it was four thirty in the morning. I went ahead and indulged in three hours’ sleep, by the end of which he was sitting up again, and the morning progressed just like the day before. I called around for advice – his doctor’s office, the hospital, the retirement community people, his friend, my mom, etc. He needed a professional’s care. Yet an in-home nurse wouldn’t be available until Monday. His doctor’s schedule was full but agreed to see him if I brought him in. I said I’d try.

I went down and borrowed a wheelchair, brought it back, and we tried to get into it from the edge of the bed. We could have done it the day before, but by now his pain was so severe, no amount of the lifting and bending we could actually do was sufficient to get him into position to sit in the wheelchair. It was just no go. Even if we did manage that, I had no idea how I’d get him into and out of the car. Or up the stairs from his door to the car, for that matter. Of course I assumed that would just have to be an act of brute strength.

No matter. Couldn’t do the wheelchair so I did something I’ve never done before: Called nine one one. Well, this is what everyone said to do. This, they told me, is how you get a patient to the hospital. Call nine one one and take him to emergency. This seemed wrong to me. Terrifically inefficient, misuse of emergency services, etc. But that’s what they said. So I did, and when the EMTs arrived, I felt like such a chump. They wanted to make sure this was a legit call, and my father’s explanations, given in the lethargy of exhaustion, weren’t useful at all. “How long have you had pain in your legs?” “Oh, about forty years.” Not something an EMT needs to hear who’s trained and is paid to assist with car crashes and that. So I explained he needed professional care and we couldn’t even get into a wheelchair, so I called you guys, sorry, that’s what the doctor told me to do. The EMT offered the opinion that doctors are idiots, but he meant it in a nice way – and then he and his big strong buddy realized they weren’t going to be able to get him into a wheelchair either and called a fire truck.

Fifteen minutes later I was amused to see no less than seven healthy men with gym physiques standing around watching a tracked vehicle with a powerful electric motor take my dad up the stairs because none of them wanted to risk their backs doing it by muscle power – the very same steps I had intended to drag him up all by myself. So I started to feel better about calling them.

He got settled in hospital and is there yet, being treated for pneumonia and a bad infection in his knee and probably various other ailments, seems lucid enough, will transfer to a care facility soon, thence back home depending on decisions we all make based on his abilities at that time. None of that is the point of this story.

The point of this story is I won’t soon forget sitting by his side in the middle of the night, watching the clock go from twelve to one to two, feeling almost completely helpless, and realizing just how lucky we were. Lucky as hell. Lucky because my father has coverage, and the money to fill in where he doesn’t. I had a picture in mind of someone of similar age with the same ailments, sharing a room in a house full of impoverished relatives, suffering an abject misery because they have no doctor, no regular access to healthcare, just an accumulation of ills that lead finally in the howling dead of night to a call to nine one one, emergency, triage, and a hospital bed with the family acutely aware they have no means to pay for it. It offends me that an old person no different from my father except they didn’t happen to be a research scientist but instead a janitor, a night watchman, a store clerk, a construction worker, unemployed for this reason or that half their life, will at the end be subject to the indignity of watching their hard-working children’s savings for their grandchildren’s college go up in smoke because of some condition that regular healthcare might likely have prevented. And let’s not even start on children who never get a trip to the dentist, or folks for whom Hep C has become a slow death sentence rather than the treatable inconvenience it ought to be.

Yeah, I know: A libertarian ex-Republican capitalist such as myself should watch out I don’t backslide into sentimentalism like that. I mean, compassion is all well and good, but watch those expenses, right? But taking the bigger view, it just isn’t efficient, not good for the economy and thus for the individuals working within it, for so many people to fall prey to illness as we allow. There has to be some balance between providing healthcare for everyone, and avoiding the monolithic nightmare of universal healthcare that the results in other countries trend towards. No doubt our Democratic candidates have such a plan in mind. I don’t know, I can’t design it for them so I just leave them all to it. I’m very suspicious of far-reaching government programs – I can’t think of a single one that’s actually worked well. But I support public schools as a matter of infrastructure (and the social equalization that goes with them is a very good thing too). Public education needs a lot of work but is fundamentally a good idea. Why not healthcare as well, somehow. The present system is stupid. Just so long as we don’t, in our well-meaning way, kill the environment that mysteriously leads to ever-improving technologies and techniques through visionary risk-taking investment and profitable reward, surely we can do a better job of caring for one another, and especially for the more vulnerable amongst us.