Just a week ago, I took my dad to a doctor’s appointment. Nothing at all wrong, but a routine check-up. Everything was good, there were no real concerns, and we left without incident, with a follow-up schedule six months from the date.
In the car ride to go find some lunch, we were lamenting on how smooth things have stabilized over the last few months, compared to his tumultuous arrival back in January where I wanted to blow my brains out on more than one occasion from his excessive neediness, anxiety and frequent phone calls; it was like I now had a third child, and this one was the most demanding of them all, and I felt terrible at how miserable I felt bringing my dad down to be closer to me.
But over the months, seemingly a combination of finally getting over the shock of relocating, settling into his new digs, falling into a sense of routine, but most importantly, getting a new team of doctors and specialists to see to his needs, all of them Korean-speaking, and getting his medications sorted, organized and properly handled, my dad began to calm down.
I had a brief crash out back in April, when a neurologist told me that I had to bring him back on five separate occasions for various tests, and I once again lamented on wtf I had gotten myself into, but the fact of the matter is that after the tests were all finally done, they didn’t necessarily find anything wrong or any new revelations, but they did put my dad on some antidepressants, and if there were ever anyone on the planet who could become the poster child for the benefits of antidepressants, it would be my dad.
And all through the year, I had been working with him on a checklist of things that needed to be handled in his transition, from the sale of his old house, the changing of all sorts of utilities and bills and address changes here and there. Military pension from ROK, logging into Social Security, Medicare, etc. Managing his finances and finding ways to put it to work.
One of the more trying side quests was the saga to get him Georgia identification, since long gone were the days of, if you had a license from any other US state, you basically could automatically get one in Georgia, pending like an eye test and a nominal fee. But I guess in the Orange America we live in, constantly phishing out potential deportation targets, my dad now had to procure proof of citizenship, which cool, he has a passport, except he lost his passport, so now I had to get him a new passport first, so he could use that to get his Georgia license, and that who debacle took nearly four months to do, but it was done.
And the state ID, was basically the final thing on the list, and it was weird for us to realize that the laundry list was actually done at this point, and it was kind of cramping my visiting schedule, because frankly, I didn’t have any tasks to do with him, which was one of the things that we enjoyed doing together in prior visits, knocking shit out, and feeling accomplished.
Me going to Korea for the summer was the best thing to happen to him, since it forced him to really be on his own for an extended period of time, and I was happy to return back to the states and hear from my sister and the facility that there were no issues, he seemingly had been chill and even took part in some of the facility’s activities, and he had no list of gripes and complaints waiting for me upon return.
The thing, after this past week’s doctor’s visit, I had this surreal moment of reflection, with myself, as well as with my sister at a later conversation, about how everything was stable, and how nice it felt. But nagging in the back of my head was the unfortunately pessimistic outlook I tend to have in life, that there’s no way that this calm could last, and it was like waiting for the other shoe to eventually drop.
And I think it’s safe to say that such a shoe did drop, since I’ve fallen back into another depression because I feel that nobody in my world gives a flying fuck about me, I’m taken for granted, nobody respects me, and my fuck-off aura continuously keeps people beyond arm’s reach at all times.
But then the one source of surprising stability, my dad, reaches out to me, to tell me that he’s not feeling that great, that his balance feels worse than ever, and he works himself up to where his home contacts emergency services, which at first I think seems excessive, but I’m glad that they did it, because it’s not for anyone to decide what’s an emergency or not if there’s potential for injury.
He passes initial stroke tests, and his BP is elevated, but not to emergency levels, and the paramedics leave, and recommend to me for him to go see his PCP. Cool, I get him into his doc the next day, and following up with him, there’s nothing out of the ordinary, and I’m led to believe that perhaps he just had a bad day. But then that evening he calls me again, stating his balance is really poor, and I can tell he’s nervous, but it’s well past the end of business, and I ask if he needs to contact emergency services again, and he tells me that he doesn’t think it’s necessary but if I could contact the doctor, which I say sure.
But I have no fucking idea which doctor to contact, because he just saw his PCP, and I’m leaning towards neurology, since they’ve been the ones working on his balance, and based on the difficulty in which it sounded like he was speaking, I’m not entirely sure if perhaps he didn’t actually have a stroke, and I just don’t really know what to do.
All I do know is that I’m going to go see him tomorrow and see what, if any, doctor I can get him in with, and hopefully, my visit does not end with him in a hospital.
Everything sucks, because things seemed to be going pretty stable and without incident, but as sure as the sun rises every day, the other shoe had to eventually drop, and when it did, it seemed to break everything it came into contact with on the way down.
Not that it matters as much as my dad concerns, but today I found out that my current boss was let go, which always feeds the narrative that nobody is ever really safe at my company, which shell shocked everyone similarly, and then the cherry on top is the Outlook global outage probably hack that really hampered our work progress today and probably means there will be deluge of emails that come roaring through if and when things get back up.
Fun times, things suddenly have become.
