Fourteen Heartbreaking Nightly Visits to the Hospital
When my family had to countdown my grandfather’s last days
Beep. Beep. Beep. Ting. Ting.
I kept hearing this pattern. Over and over again. Along with other noises that evoked my hearing sense, of course. There was a random TV going on in the background, sounds of people chit-chatting, a baby bawling its eyes out, a fan droning on & on, and amidst all this, an eerie silence.
Hospitals are complicated. It’s a place of birth and death — intense emotions of happiness and sorrow. No other location can beat this emotionally charged environment, other than places of worship, probably.
The past couple of weeks have been quite traumatic and draining. With my 80-year-old grandfather admitted to the hospital ICU for the past 14 days, the whole family went through intense physical and emotional stress.
It was sudden.
I got a call from my mother two weeks back at 5:40 am, informing me that “thatha” (as I call him) was admitted to the hospital. Apparently, he couldn’t breathe for four excruciating long hours from 1:00 am and was finally ushered in at 5:00 am because of a neighbor’s kind heart. My mother immediately left on a six-hour journey to my native town to check on her father with my dad.
Everything seemed okay at first.
We got a call an hour later that he got into the emergency room, doctors had checked upon him, and things seemed to be normal. But, as the day passed, the situation only seemed to escalate. First, the doctors took him into the ICU because the episode repeated (he struggled to breathe again). Then he had to be put on a ventilator because he underwent a heart attack, and his oxygen levels dropped drastically.
After almost 24 hours of diagnosis, the doctors found the exact cause. Every part of his body worked perfectly other than his heart. And since the main blood-pumping organ was not effective in functioning, there was fluid forming in his lungs. The oxygen level in the body dropped, including in the brain. Thus the erratic behavior and not recognizing his daughters. Or his wife.
For a brief period, of course.
The situation continued to be hectic from then on. Looking back, every day feels like a jumbled mess in my head. We went to take two steps forward only to step back by two steps on a daily basis. A heart attack that followed did not help. Feelings of helplessness swallowed my family since they could do nothing to help my grandfather.
We did have company through close relatives for the first couple of days, but that’s how long even relatives can give solace — a couple of days. After that, my parents asked them to get back on their daily lives and kept updating them on the status.
After 14 intensely hectic, painful, heartbreaking days of seeing my strong thatha lying down connected to thousands of wires in the hospital, after seeing him cry for the first time in pain, I was relieved when my parents signed the document confirming not to put him in the ventilator again.
We were okay to see him go but not suffer anymore. It was heartbreaking, but it needed to be done.
But just a couple of hours later, my family finally breathed a humongous sigh of relief when the doctors declared him fit to get into a normal wardroom. Out of the ventilator, with less tubes connected to his body, and where he could be with his close ones. While he still couldn’t talk because of tubes connected to his trachea, he conversed with his hands. Pain and happiness consumed his eyes. And I had never witnessed such conflicting emotions in someone’s irises.
I kept encouraging him to recover soon since he had to help me with my writing assignments. He was a walking talking encyclopedia, you see. Filled with information about engineering, world history, politics, literature, and whatnot.
But that evening, his oxygen dropped, his pulse rate dipped. Only to get back again to normal levels, twice that day. Every time, my family rushed to the hospital expecting the worst. But after two times, everyone’s mind had the same thing. He wanted to live and was fighting for it. He was desperate to live with his family, so he kept fighting an internal war.
Every moment this happened, I kept getting a series of flashbacks, almost like a movie. Of all my memories with him. Our silent walks, mind-boggling conversations, life advice, disagreements, fights, the feel of his hand, everything from the past 24 years.
But in the end, his life was meant to be taken the next day morning. At 7:15 am. He was not meant to stay with us anymore. He was not meant to talk to me anymore.
I’ll miss you thatha. Always.
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