Towards the light

Towards the light, originally uploaded by magnum_lady.

Grief is a funny old thing. Just as you feel that life is back to normal and everything is going OK, it jumps up and bites you in the bum.

The kids were watching a video of them when they were babies and all of a sudden my dad appeared on screen….I burst into tears and then felt really bad. I’m the sort of person that holds everything in and puts a brave face on things so it really took me by surprise. (For those of you that aren’t regular visitors to my blog, my dad died at the end of March.)

Not that I think Dad should still be here (which sounds awful) but he really suffered in the last years of his life.

To give you a brief rundown. Dad was well until seven years ago. He had a bit of high blood pressure from time to time and also had angina which made him slightly breathless but apart from that he was fine.
He was a keen photographer, also a very handy man, did up lots of houses over the years. He also loved going out and about.

Then mum got ill, she was diagnosed with cancer and had to spend 6 weeks in St. Luke hospital in Dublin. While she was there dad ate rubbish and his blood pressure went up.

Mum came home from hospital and dad ended up in it! The doctor said he needed to have a stent to unblock a partially blocked artery. Mum and I were both against it as dad really wasn’t that bad and we felt if he started looking after himself he would be OK.

Dad was stubborn though and said the proceedure would give him a ‘new lease of life’. It did that alright, he ended up having some kind of reaction to the dye and got kidney failure. So spent 3 days a week having to go into hospital for dialysis.

It wasn’t too bad in the beginning (apart from having his spleen ruptured by a doctor trying to remove fluid from his lungs).
At least when he recovered from that and mum recovered from her bowel surgery they were able to go out occasionally.
It was hard work having both parents ill at the same time though.

Anyway a couple of years ago dad was complaining of a pain in his leg. A doctor told him he had pulled a muscle and gave him some pain killers. Ten days later dad was still in a lot pain so finally an xray was taken……but no one thought to look at it and sent dad home.

The following day dad got up and fell and broke his wrist, we called an ambulance and got him to hospital where they also realised he had a broken hip for ten days. So he ended up having two operations and was in hospital while he recovered.

It more or less finished his life though, his confidence had gone and he was very depressed, to top it all off he fell again last year in the hospital and broke the same hip again. Poor Dad he ended up not able to do anything at all for himself. He had the stent because he didn’t want to just drop dead of a heart attack (his words not mine), but I think if I had to make that decision I know which way I’d rather die.

Rest in peace dad, I hope you are happy now and not in pain anymore xxxx