I stayed over last night and I’m still at mom and dad’s as I write this.
Yesterday evening I arrived around 4 so I’m not sure what kind of a day dad had. He slept until after mom and I ate dinner. Mom went to Wednesday night church service, so I got to hang out with dad until she got back. While she was gone, dad and I watched an episode of “Columbo.” When mom got home we watched a western. Then around 10 I emptied dad’s Ileostomy bag and got him ready for bed.
At dinner time mom and I had a good visit with each other. She asked me if I thought dad was getting worse. I didn’t put much thought into my response to her, and I wish I had. I told her “yes, he was getting worse.” I explained to her how he’s having a harder time swallowing and he’s not wanting, or isn’t able, to drink as many Ensures as he had been. It upset her. I apologized later to her, she told me she needed me to be honest and it was ok.
Dad has to set an alarm clock to go off throughout the night every 45 minutes. I heard it go off around 3 and it startled me, so I got up and checked on him. He said he was ok; he was just venting his bag. I went back to bed and slept hard till 5 when my alarm went off. I was having a weird dream and was glad to be woken up. I dreamed I was in a restaurant sitting at this table that was at least 6 or 7 feet tall and I was sitting on bar stools that were equally as tall. One of the fellows that I was with actually died many years ago, so it struck me as odd that he was in my dream. I had a constant fear the whole time that I was going to fall off of those stools and get hurt. So I woke up perplexed. I got up and very quietly prepared for my day, in the dark. I drank my coffee and spent an hour and a half or more in silence off to myself as everyone else slept.
A little after 7 I came into the living room to check on dad. He was awake and listening to the radio, so I came in and sat with him till he was ready for a task that required my help. He told me that he had a weird dream this morning. He dreamed he was lying in a shallow boat and he was fishing in a river. He said he hooked a fish and it pulled really hard. He spent most of his dream fighting it trying to get it in and when the fish finally surfaced it was as long as the boat he was in. It appeared to him to be a Gar or some similar fish. He got tangled up in the line as he tried to get the fish in. He woke up in middle of all of that. It sounds to me like dads dream of lying in a shallow boat was really him lying in his bed, and fishing was really him managing his illness. Reeling in, pulling and fighting and getting tangled up in the line are representations of his daily struggles with surviving his cancer. The fish, especially the shock of its size in comparison to his boat, is the cancer itself. That’s how I see it, if it were to be deciphered by someone who believes in such things. To dad, it was just a pleasurable fishing experience. He said he wasn’t upset by it, but that the dream was entertaining to him.
Around 8 or so I gathered dad’s bathroom sundries and helped him prepare for his morning. We spoke a little. He wanted to talk about sin, so we talked about sin. I didn’t have a lot to say on the subject, only listened and told him that I understood. Dad’s still trying to teach me things. An example, he explained to me last night why the water in the tap is so cold. He asked me why I thought it was that way. I told him because the well is cold. “No” he said, “it’s because the water stands in the pipes under the house and its cold under the house. When you turn on the tap it’s that standing water that is running out. When it warms up then all the standing water is out of the lines. So with that said, you should let your water run a little before you drink it, especially if you have copper pipes. Just so you can flush out the impurities that gather while sitting. So, dad is still teaching me things even now, how cool is that.
Dad is feeling good this morning. I’m feeling good mentally. We’ve been listening to sermons on BBN. We’re just hanging out in the moment, waiting for time to pass. The hospice nurse comes today and hopefully she will bring dad a vented Ileostomy bag. I’m going to help mom change it out and then go home and do what I need to do today. I need to go buy dad a new “touch lamp.” The kind that you can touch and it turns on and off, I broke his original lamp… I tried to fix it, and I did temporarily. He told me not to feel too bad; he broke it too and had to fix it as well…
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