My dad’s life story may be nearing an end. He is resting reasonably comfortably, although an occasional moan will emerge as if, somewhere, he’s feeling pain or discomfort. But he really hasn’t been coherent the last couple of days, at least not during the time I’ve spent at his bedside. There are periods where he [...]
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No, that’s not a description of what’s ailing the economy. “Failure to thrive” is my father’s latest official diagnosis, sort of a catch-all when no single medical issue–and he has a bunch–immediately jumps out as the cause of his current decline. He’s dealing with recurring pneumonia, has lost weight, and has started declining meals, eating [...]
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The telephone rang at home Saturday morning. It was my sister, Bonnie. “Something’s happening.” When Bonnie’s phone call came, I was still on my last cup of morning coffee. I had posted more scans of my dad’s old pictures earlier in the morning, including some of him in Aloha Week events that took place 60 [...]
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It’s been over a month since my dad’s brush with pneumonia. We were all lucky, I suppose. He survived, despite the bad reaction to antibiotics, and has been been on a long, slow recovery trajectory. For several weeks, he was just exhausted. Slept a lot. I admit to visiting less. In the past couple of [...]
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There’s been a bit of a scare as we transferred from the dementia train to the medical express. It started with a cough. It was the middle of last week, and when I pulled into the parking lot of the nursing home for an afternoon visit with my father, I spotted my sister in her [...]
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This is getting to be a routine for me, a Saturday visit to see my dad, arriving at the Oahu Care Facility late in the morning, probably just after 11 a.m. Meda dropped me off and drove down to check out the Goodwill thrift store, just a few blocks farther along Beretania. I waiting for [...]
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July 5th was a holiday, and we drove into Honolulu so that I could drop in for another late morning visit with my dad. I usually get over to his nursing home in the late afternoon. He’s almost always in bed, and if awake he’ll ask me what time of day it is and, invariably, [...]
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I finally got to connect with my father yesterday, a little more than three weeks after my last visit. First there was our absence, a brief trip to the east coast, then the nursing home implemented a quarantine on his floor because of an outbreak of an intestinal flu that lasted over a week, and [...]
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