Cycle of life hits home on a weekend with Dad
SCHULTZ: Caregiver, receiver switch places
| Saturday, Jun 06 2009 09:09 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Jun 06 2009 09:09 PM
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As I perch on a chair in a little cubby in the emergency room at Providence Holy Cross Hospital, I confront a few of the reasons why I did not choose a career in health care. I am squeamish about medical procedures and the breakdown of the human body.
I listen and try not to watch as my father's Foley catheter is flushed out, extracted, and a new one inserted. My dad grunts in pain; the nurse soothes and keeps working. It is my weekend to take care of my dad, and it is not going well. I am a failure at home health care. I am tired and freaked out, and this is our third trip to the ER this weekend.
For the past month I've been shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles, where my parents live, and my real life in Tehachapi. My dad is in end-stage congestive heart failure. He has fluid in his lungs. His liver is enlarged. He also suffers from kidney failure, for which he goes to dialysis three times a week. Now his prostate is acting up, making urination excruciating.
My dad has spent some harrowing times recently in the hospital and then in a nursing home. But he is home for good now, for the time he has left. A nice young man named Andrew takes care of him during the week, and then my sister and I take turns on the weekend.
Taking care of a parent in the same ways that that parent once took care of you is exhausting, both physically and emotionally. There is the surreal oddity of changing your father's disposable, pull-up underwear. There is the cutting of food into small pieces, and then the coaxing to get any of it eaten. There is the staving off of poorly timed, unwelcome tears. There is the sheer physicality of it all, the lifting, the guiding, the tucking, the pushing.
And I have only been the primary caregiver for one weekend.
I think of all the people who take care of ill or incapacitated loved ones day in and day out, who can't afford Andrew's non-insurance-covered services, who have no one to take turns with on the weekend. I can't imagine the weighty, ever-present burden they carry. After 48 hours, I am cranky, sore, and overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy. I haven't slept much. I haven't showered. I haven't had a moment that hasn't been consumed with my dad's immediate needs. But I know I am going home soon, and I will be the one getting updated.
The caregiving is especially difficult because my dad has always been the alpha male of the family. To be so dependent is impossibly hard for him. He is unhappy, in pain, and basically over it. "Your father's a pain in the neck," he said to me at one point, in a lucid moment. (Lucidity arrives randomly. At other times he talks about how he's opening a string of cancer clinics, or pulling for Aretha Franklin to win her perjury case, or privy to the final score of the Lakers game before it is over. I am not making these up.)
"You're spending your whole weekend here."
"That's what families do," I say. "Good thing we have a big one."
"It's too much," he says.
"You'd do it for me, Dad," I say.
"I did do it for you," he answers.
And there it is: the cycle of child, parent, child. The father of my childhood who was as tall as the roof of the front porch, as hearty as a lumberjack after a pancake breakfast, who could do/say/figure out/triumph over anything life could throw at him, is frail now, skin and bones, weakened by the betrayal of organs and the erosion of years, relying on others to keep all the balls in the air.
And I'm a bad juggler.
One of my daughters visits briefly during the weekend, and when she hugs me goodbye, our embrace lasts much longer than usual. I can feel her strong young body against my tired one, comforting me, seeking comfort. I realize that I may one day be in her and her sisters' capable, loving hands. I think of my dad saying "I did do it for you," and I know what he meant. We care for our children with all our heart and strength. They grow up and look their future in the eye, and we think we did pretty well. They watch us age and falter as they mature, and they know that they may someday need to take care of us. And so it goes.
In the dead of night, as I rest on a mattress on the floor of the room where my dad frets and tosses, he sings in his delirious, waking sleep:
"Show me the way to go home;
I'm tired and I wanna go to bed ... "
He sings in a sweet slow monotone. Twice, three times, four times. It sounds like a prayer. I pray along, that he'll find his way home.
These are Valerie Schultz's opinions, not necessarily those of The Californian. Her column appears on Sundays. Write to her at spring22@bak.rr.com.
