Whose Side are You On?

It is 8:18 a.m., and I have been up for almost three hours.

A little before 5:30, my phone started ringing. I assumed it was a robocall, but it was from the hospital. My dad is still there, being observed after taking a fall.

When you have an elderly parent in the hospital, and they call you before dawn, certain ideas flow through your head. You know it’s not good news, and you can’t think of anything trivial that might generate a call.

It turned out he was still among the living. They told me he was combative and that he was cursing the staff and refusing to cooperate. Security people were in the room. They asked me to come and deal with him.

I thought it was 3:27 a.m. I had read my clock incorrectly. I wondered how he could possibly be up that early.

I had them put him on the phone, and he told me the people at the hospital were ignorant and that they were refusing to let him get out of bed purely because of ego. He wanted to use the bathroom in his room, and they wanted him to stay in bed.

Needless to say, it was not long before I found myself driving to the hospital.

When I got there, he was in bed with his feet facing the head of the bed. I started asking him what was happening, and he gave me his opinion of the staff again.

What a mess. He didn’t have any interest in hearing about the medical or legal reasons for discouraging him from walking around. He asked me if I was taking their side.

I don’t know what they did. Maybe they were tactless or heavy-handed. In any case, there wasn’t a whole lot of merit to his complaints. When you’re in the hospital, you work with the staff unless they’re completely crazy. You don’t curse at them or get in physical confrontations with them.

They said they had given him some kind of “medication,” which I took to mean he had been given a sedative or tranquilizer.

I worked with both sides, and we helped him use the bathroom and settle himself into a recliner. I turned out the lights and sat with him, and eventually, he slept. Unlike me, he can sleep in a hospital chair. Finally, he asked to be moved back to the bed, and once he seemed to be inclined to sleep, I left to get some breakfast.

I reminded my dad about what happened to his law school friend Joe. He had surgery to fix an abdominal aneurysm, and while he was in the hospital, he insisted on going to the bathroom by himself. He fell, hit his head on the sink, and died. This is what my dad’s nurse wanted to prevent. I don’t think I made an impression on him.

I’m about to go lie down with ear plugs and a sleep mask and see if I can sleep for a couple of hours. I had been looking forward to a full night of sleep, so I was not happy when the phone rang. I left the hospital after 2 a.m. on his first night there, so last night, I figured I was going to make up the deficit.

If you like to fight with people and get your own way, you need to get over it while you’re young. The last thing you want, when you become demented, is to have the habit of pushing people around. It doesn’t work after life takes all the face cards out of your hand. You may be a big shot today, but when you lose the ability to look after yourself, you’ll be just another patient in a gown, and people with very little status or education will be telling you what to do. You’ll also be wrong consistently, so your battles will be a waste of time, serving only to make other people miserable and motivate them to mistreat you.

You may be the boss today, but there is no way you’ll be able to tell people what to do when you get close to 90. You may lose all your clout a lot sooner than that.

If you’re grateful and considerate, health care people and your relatives will treat you better. They’re human. They can only stand so much crap, and they will reward seniors who make their lives easier.

As for hospitals, they are funny places. They are dedicated to improving people’s health, yet they make it impossible for patients to sleep or walk. Isn’t sleep important to health? Of course it is. But if you go to a hospital, you will find that they leave your door open all night, with the light streaming in. People who work there will walk up and down the halls all night, talking loudly and socializing. You’ll start to drift off, and someone in scrubs will yell, “HEY! TINO! WHASSUP?!”

If I ran an institution that gave care to crabby patients, I’d do everything I could to help them sleep. When hospitals keep patients awake at night, the staff pays for it during the day.

Patients need to walk, too. Obvious? But hospitals don’t make much provision for it. They are actually causing health problems by forcing ambulatory patients to lie in bed.

Hospitals are monuments to mankind’s failure. God wanted to take care of us and keep us well, and we didn’t listen. Now instead of divine health, we have things like catheters and staples and amputations.

I found a nice access ramp I can install to keep my dad from falling on the steps again, and I am sorting through ways to help him get on his feet. We might need to look into an electric cart eventually. I wonder if they can be rigged with GPS so he can only go so far.

The physical side of his problems can be addressed fairly well. I can’t do anything about his attitude or his perceptions, and I don’t think he can do anything, either. He could have changed his way of thinking 10 years ago, but now it’s too much to hope for.

If you don’t get along with people, change your ways now, while you can. Eventually, they will have the upper hand almost all the time. You will be at their mercy, and you better know how to make it flow.

I’m off to bed. Let’s see how long I go before the next phone call.