The Hardest Part Today.

Several times over the last month my mom and I have caught my dad having problems, getting sick, or just doing something that he shouldn’t and hiding it. Let’s be honest, we expected the last circumstance, but within the last month or so he has hidden things like when he threw up when he was getting the flu, when he spilled a cup of coffee all over the floor and didn’t clean it up for hours, and when he hurt his foot in the middle of the night and bled all over the carpet and the floor and didn’t clean it up leaving a dried trail of blood across the house. My mother and I have always had to stumble across each mess later and ask him specific questions in order to figure out what has been happening to him while he has been in the bathroom, taking a “nap”, etc. While this has become and annoying side affect of his brain damage it is not unmanageable. We just become the annoying twins that ask him all the time if he has to go to the bathroom, if he feels sick, if he ate, if he took his pills (then we check because he doesn’t remember), tell him to remember his cane, to put on his coat, to take his keys with him, to take off his shoes, to take his coffee with him in the morning…


I don’t blame him for getting annoyed with us, we pester him to death just to get him out the door with all of his stuff in the morning, but I know if we don’t he won’t take his pills, won’t take the keys to the building, wear his medic alert necklace, take his book for therapy, etc. Some days when I hear him getting up to get a snack I have to get up and see what he is eating to make sure A) he can eat it, as he is allergic to milk and B) it is not something that he shouldn’t eat as it has maybe been in the fridge one or two too many days.

So...I digress. My point was, while this is annoying it is manageable right? What I fear is that one day something is going to happen to him, something like he is going to have a horrible reaction to a stroke and not tell us, he is going to hide it. Then we will have no recourse until it is too late. I walked into the bathroom the other morning and found an extremely bloody Kleenex in the waste basket. Turns out he had a bloody nose that day and hadn’t told anyone, even though he couldn’t remember how to stop it.

One day something is going to happen to him and he is not going to tell us until it is too late, I just know it.