The protagonist
The following was written at 10:40 pm on November 17, 2022, in Room 5324 of Greenville Memorial Hospital in Greenville, SC. The content has not been edited; it did not make sense to edit the raw state of emotion.
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I’m losing my dad. He’s still here, but I’m losing him soon. We’re in the hospital together, for the 21st night in a row. Half of the nights I’ve spent with him — taking turns with my mom — and tonight is our last night here. Tomorrow we go home. Tomorrow we cease treatment. Tomorrow we meet Hospice, and whatever else may lie ahead. Death is inevitable. It’s inevitable for all. But this one is coming soon.
It’s 10:40 pm and I thought I was going to sleep for a while. I’m tired — beyond tired, as anyone would be after sleeping so many nights on this pull-out contraption they call a bed. But honestly, that hasn’t even bothered me a bit. Neither has the waking up every hour to give him water, food; to help him go to the bathroom; to turn off the incessant beeping of the IVs, as he’s either once again rolled on top of it, or there’s air in the line, or the treatment is complete. The former two I’ve learned to fix, the latter my mom learned to silence. We’ve learned a lot during our time here. And while three weeks in a hospital seems eternal, if I think back just three weeks further, my dad was out in the yard, feeding his birds; he was planning his next woodworking project; he was eating at our local Mexican restaurant on a Sunday. And now, fast forward six weeks later, and he’s dying. I listen to his labored breathing — his resting heart rate is higher than my average aerobic heart rate — and it hurts me to my core to see him suffer.
Three weeks ago, after a brutal six-hour wait in the emergency room, he told my mom that more than anything in the world, he wanted to lie down on the floor. He was in so much pain, and no one would help us. So, we laid out a blanket on the filthy emergency room floor and gave him what he wanted. How could we not?
Today, he told my mom that more than anything in the world, he wanted to go home. He wants to be at home, with his cats, and with all of his stuff. So, we’ve made a plan to send him home. How could we not?
There have certainly been moments of the what if’s, of the miracles, of the notion that the man has had cancer for twelve years and is still alive. He’s strong! He can do this! But there have been many more moments of doubt, of more bad news we weren’t expecting, and of the overwhelming sense that the man has, in fact, had cancer for twelve years, and he simply can’t fight it anymore. His luck has come to an end.
And speaking of luck — here is where I need to explain a little thing called Pettigrew Luck. It is actually not luck at all, but is the opposite of luck, and something that my family has come to joke about over the years. It is this bad luck that has given us somewhat of a humorous outlook on my dad’s situation. He’s had bad luck with health for many years now, with a triple bypass surgery, the chronic leukemia-lymphoma diagnosis, and an ultra-rare diagnosis of Legionnaire’s disease in 2020. Now, in 2022, as it turns out, his cancer has transformed into a more aggressive lymphoma — also rare — and today we learned that he was just diagnosed with a new disease that the hospital has only ever seen two other cases of in the past 25 years. Now that’s Pettigrew luck.
Of course it’s good to find humor where you can — no matter how dark — and that’s one of the many wonderful life lessons my dad has taught me. He has also taught me to be kind, especially to vulnerable people and to animals. He is an actual animal whisperer, and has nursed multiple animals back to health. One thanksgiving he nursed a wounded squirrel back to health, and in another instance he got a wild bird to perch on his arm so he could untangle the string wrapped around its leg. Hence why I should have known that the dead bird I found on our doorstep yesterday was a bad omen. I can only assume the bird was looking for my dad, but couldn’t find him! He was here. In the hospital.
I don’t want him to die in the hospital, and I want to make his dying days a little bit better. For nearly the whole time we’ve been here, we’ve gotten along. We’re extremely similar creatures — we like quiet time to observe and to think. Noise is annoying, and so are stupid people. We are judgmental; we are pleasant with strangers; we are not as pleasant with the people we actually know and care about. The list goes on. But the point of this, is that while we got along nearly the whole time we’ve been here, the one time he got annoyed with me was after one night when his resting heart rate got up into the 150s, and I was seriously concerned he was going to go into cardiac arrest —
…
And that was all I was able to write that night. At that moment, around midnight, our nurse came into the room to double-check a blood pressure measurement that a tech had just taken. The number was apparently very low, so low that she needed to double-check it herself. She was calm while she double- and triple-checked it and brought out the manual machine. It was extremely low. So low, in fact, that he could stop breathing at any moment. I was horrified. No, this is not how this was supposed to happen! We are not home yet!
There are so many more things that happened that night, and so many details that I will never forget. But I don’t want to write about those. I want to share how, in the end, we made it home, where he peacefully passed away, just hours after getting there. He spoke one last time when he knew he was home, placed in his ‘final’ resting place; a tear rolled down the side of his face.
And if we back up a few paragraphs to where I got cut off, I want to share why he was angry with me when he was close to cardiac arrest. I didn’t get a chance to write it that night, but a couple of days after his previous death scare, when he was feeling a bit stronger, I remember exactly what he said:
“I heard you got all in a tizzy the other day about my heart rate. Stop being such a protagonist. You don’t need to be doing that. You are not supposed to save me. You are supposed to comfort me.”
Wow, ok, rude. But with that last simple phrase, “you are supposed to comfort me,” — spoken at a time when I wasn’t yet ready for him to die — he showed me that he had already accepted what was to come. At the time, I ignored these implications and buried what I knew to be true. But I obliged.
And looking back, I now understand. He was ready. I wasn’t ready, but he was. Today, I’m still not ready, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. But it doesn’t really matter. Because it’s not about me. It was never about me. This is my daddy’s story and I’ll guard it and carry it with me until the day that I finally am ready; the day that I leave this place and we are reunited.
— S
