When The Time Comes

It's been one-kind of a weekend, the kind that sort of throws things into a unreal plane, where things you don't wanna think about cut left and right, where the weight of the unforseen comes delivered, sign, sealed, ominous and absolute. This is the bit of the blog where I realise I am going on without a story. Simply put, my father is in the hospital right now with a lung infection.

It started out simply. A few coughs and a buildup of phlegm, one could not see beyond the premature inklings of a bad cold. But it got worse and soon his breathing was affected by the mucousy buildup in the lungs. I think we tried something like 2-3 different cough mixtures before I convinced my mother to ring the ambulance. Well, I was loud and abrasive and in a "I told you so" mood. I am not that nice a person in the morning. This was last Friday, the end of November. (My dad is really old by the way, hard of sight and hearing, hence the ambulance).

At Tan Tock Seng, a lung infection was proclaimed with evidence from the a less-than-desirable white-patched X-ray of the chest. By 3pm, he had a room on the 7th floor. The docs, all three of them who endured my father's verbal and physical abuse at being poked and prodded by strangers (he knocked a tray of meds off the bed, and they clattered all over the linoleum floor). It was funny. Then the docs asked my mum and I aside and said that this case of lung infection or pneumonia wasn't easy to cure in a man of extended years and to expect the worst. The words entered my brain and were duly processed, and I remained calm and logical. It wasn't till later that the impact sort of it, and oddly physically too. It was like a heaviness across the chest and a dryness of the throat. 'So this is it' I was thinking. Nothing else really. Not like the millions of flashes one is supposed to get when falling to the death at the end of a bungee rope before the cord reaches the elastic limit and retracts. Not unfathomable but unexpected, I guess the idea that a cold may be the 'killer' was furthest from my mind. I sat in the hard leather seat in the ward and just stared blankly, nodding and mumbling occasionally at my mother's questions and rantings.

I dozed off for a while. I went to pee and wet my dry eyes. OK, bad use of liquids in a descriptive sentence. My mother and I hung around my father as the nurses came and stuck tubes into him, fed him intravenous meds, changed him, fussed about. I left about 930pm while my mother stayed over. When I got home, it felt weird not seeing my dad's room light not on (he's a little afraid of the dark). I guess I was too tired and had Pedal Ubin the next day and knocked out soon after a shower and a quick conversation with God.

I woke an hour late for Ubin. F***. It was the first time I took a taxi to Changi Point, and became $18 poorer for missing the first ring of the clock and the subsequent chain of buses. But richer for the hour of snooze! The Ubin trip deserves another post later but this catharsis is necessarily first.I got to the ward at about 4pm and found my father in a better state of health. The vacuuming-suckups and antibiotics were working and the no-food regimen was helping harden the phelgm. Hip hop hooray.

I spent 9 hours at my father's bedside today. I was adjusting, feeding and entertaining him. He's become more normal (standards differ for each family I am sure). I can only hope the lungs clearer relatively completely by end week.

More importantly, I dunno, I don't think I am ready. I don't think many will be. Though it's got me thinking about the future, of an emptier house, of the lack of demands for attention (mostly for milk) in the middle of the night and the beard I won't have to shave. It's got me thinking about the past, about how I came to realise how smart his man was for someone who didn't go beyond Primary 4 (I'll tell you about the 100 animals for $100 maths problem some other time), about the time I sat on his lap on the single front seat on the noisy 198 bus to Tekka from Jurong, about the time I came home and cried when I broke my front tooth in Primary 5, his pork-curry-rice. Plus so many other things, +++++.

Yeah you can call it a big weekend.