You don't have to be funny

"You don't have to be funny" was the only thing Mandy said to me when I told her I needed to think of something to blog about.

She is right. I don't always have to be funny. I just got back from the hospital where I went and saw my father in ICU. I just took a glance at my funny-o-meter and it is dipping way down in the red area where it has a picture of a sad clown.

Why fight it. I am just going to shoot from the hip and pour a little bit off the top of whatever is swilling around in my head.

A week and a half ago he went in for open heart surgery. A little less than a week and a half ago, he planned on waking up and saying "Son of a bitch That hurts. Someone bring me a Mountain Dew before I get cranky." A week and a half ago, the doctors lost him three times on the operating table.

I went to see him last Saturday. He looked horrible but I was optimistic. Today when I went to see him he looked better, but I am less optimistic. He has made progress every day. Baby steps of improvement. But, baby steps on an escalator that is moving in the opposite direction. For every day that he lays in ICU he atrophies a bit more. He looses more strength. The road to recovery becomes longer and more perilous. If by Thursday, he still needs to be intubated, they have no choice but to give him a trachea tube.

Tonight he looked pained and weathered. His brow was furrowed. When my sister and I walked in his room he twitched his feet and he shrugged his left shoulder so far forward, that I almost expected to see him sit up. Yesterday he was opening his eyes when visitors came to see him. Today they have sedated him beyond that point.

The thought has re-occurred to me several times that while he was on the operating table, the veil between this life and the next, most certainly became very wispy if not completely withdrawn. I am sure his parents and his sister were there to greet him. I am sure returning back to a badly damaged and pained body is difficult. A transition, I am not convinced would come without a lot of hesitation.

I no longer know what to hope for him. A recovery that means he spends the rest of his life being cared for in a nursing home or having 24 hour hospice care. I don't know if I want that for him. I know how he feels about that. My sister who is a nurse went to visit him last week and mentioned the long recovery that would possibly involve rehabilitation in a nursing home. at that utterance all of his monitors went off. He did not, and does not like that idea at all. That man loathes any indications that he was aging. He turned 79 last Saturday. He spent the day sedated, with a breathing machine doing all of his blowing in and out for him. There's a good chance he had no clue it was his birthday.

A week and and a half ago, I had no clue he was going in for surgery. He didn't call us to let us know. My sister found out and had called us. A week and a half ago I also wasn't as patient with my children as I am now. A week and a half ago I didn't listen as closely to other people as I do now. A week and a half ago I didn't stop as long to admire a cloud formation or notice how crisp the morning air is.

I don't know what is the best thing for my father. I don't know what the future has slated for him. The best I can do is hope and pray. The best I can do is see that tomorrow I am a better person for what I have seen today. The best I can do is give my funny-o-meter a few rapid succession taps on the glass, to see if we can get it back up into the green area that has the picture of a dancing clown, because he has been set on fire by a circus chimp... because, as we all know, chimps and clowns on fire are probably the funniest things known to man. Well, that and fart jokes.