Stop Fighting the World

3 weeks ago, dad was admitted to the local hospital, due to vomiting block substances.

For dad’s dignity I’ll keep it private what exactly was causing the problem, but lets just say there was no internal bleeding (thank god!).

Dad was sent into hospital late Tuesday night around 9pm, the nursing home rang the ambulance and sent him on his way – after questioning them, i found out they sent his paperwork with him.

They tried to call me and left a voice message around 10.15pm.

On Wednesday morning around 6am I woke to use the bathroom, I looked at my phone and saw a voice message.

Roughly it told me dad was vomiting, he was rather unwell, and they had sent him to hospital. I jumped out of bed and started to get ready. I’m not exactly the quietest person in the world (ask my mother she says I walk around the house like an elephant), so I ended up wakening my mum and told her what happened. It all went so quick then, she woke my brother and called the hospital to get an update on dads’ condition.

I could have cried, he had been in hospital all night alone, unable to communicate. My worst fear had finally come true.

Dad needed me and I wasn’t there. My phone didn’t ring. For years I was always obsessed with having my phone on me, in case it was the call to say he was in trouble.

Ryan and I had been visiting family on the Tuesday night, honestly it is a mystery why I never got the call. I was told I had been called 5 times, but there were no missed calls. Ryan had no missed calls and no voice message!

We got to the hospital and one thing lead to another, the doctors came and spoke to us, the nurse came and asked how to give him his medication and we called dads sister.

Dads sister came down as soon as she could, she must have flew down the road, i was grateful she was there. I called my support worker and could barely get the words out. I was crying so hard i couldn’t see anything. I have never felt so scared in all my life.

He was shortly moved to a ward, still within the A&E department.

Ryan, dads sister and i stayed with him all day. My aunt sent my brother and i home for food and when we got back she soon left. I stayed with him, scared to leave him. I sat with him for the whole next day until the ambulance came and lifted him. My brother went back to work the next day and my aunt was at the other end of the phone offering to come down.

Any other information should be in my previous blog post, this post is about why I didn’t get the call and what I am or have done about it.

I was so angry; I was more than angry. Why the fuck did they stop calling me, why didn’t the hospital try contact his next of kin.

I had questions;

Why were they calling him William? Its pretty common here in Ireland / Northern Ireland to have two names and go by your middle name. So for example my name is Kyra Ashley Clarke but everyone calls me Ashley. Well dad is the same. William Desmond but he gets called Dessie. This was in his notes the nursing home sent along with everything else they needed to know about him.

The nurse had to ask me how to give him his medication, they had no clue he needed soft food, or needed thickener in his liquids. What if they gave him a regular drink?

Was is easier to ask us than read his notes?

Does this mean he lay in a hospital bed with people taking blood, poking him and him not understanding what was going on. The Dr and nurses kept talking to him and you could see him trying to respond but was unable.

The entire experience was horrific, I will never get the image of dad lying in the hospital bed out of my mind.

Ryan entered the cubicle and turned his back to dad, i had to leave! i stepped out so dad didn’t see me upset.

I will never forget that I let him down and wasn’t there for him,

Am I angry at the hospital and nursing home, I was?

I spoke to the nursing home, and they say they followed protocol, I have made sure in future they do not stop calling Ryan, Dads sister or myself until one of us is reached on the phone.

I feel terrible about what happened and how it happened. According to the nursing home it’s the hospitals fault. Do I want to go after them, write a big angry letter of complaint and have them issue a letter of apology? Get some poor nurse in trouble?

No, I havent got the strength, we don’t know how long we have left with dad and I don’t want to spend the remainder of his days, months or years fighting a hospital. Mistakes were made, thankfully nothing was life threatening. I don’t want to be reminded of the night I let dad down. I want to accept it happened and try to move on.

What is the point in fighting everyone, things aren’t perfect, people make mistakes? As we all know, HD is a rare disease, the nurse or Dr may not have experienced someone with dads’ condition before or knew how to care for him.

So, the point of this blog post is, stop fighting the world, stop getting angry at the world. Take that chip off your shoulder. I have recently and it has made me a much happier person. I have been let down by so many health professionals over the years. I don’t want to waste my time and energy fighting them, I have HD to fight. Weather im fighting for dad, my brother or myself.

I know some may say, ‘’if you don’t make them aware of their mistakes it could happen someone else’’.

I doubt this, lets be fair, ill write a letter to the hospital, they will read it and issue an apology letter. The staff wont even know what happened or that the letter was received.

What good is all the fighting with the world for a simple letter saying sorry. It wont change the fact that dad was alone, in a hospital bed for ten hours. That’s something I will have to live with. No amount of ‘’sorry’’ will make me feel any better.

So, to sum it all up.

Stop fighting the world.

Fight HD

LOVE AND SPEND TIME WITH YOUR LOVED ONES.