Dad, again

Dad rang me last Monday from A&E to say he had had a fall. Since then I’ve been putting in calls to try to piece together what actually happened.  Not easy as he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth about himself and even at the best of times the NHS has trouble getting its story straight.

If I took the various things he has told me at face value then his strength has been failing rapidly over the last few weeks leading to a fall in which he probably broke his hip and he is now awaiting a “special scan”, which will determine if he has a fracture and possibly the extent to which he is riddled with bone cancer.  Following the “special scan” the doctors will finally realise how badly they have misdiagnosed his increasing mobility problems and will operate on his hip or his knee or both, leading to death on the operating table or a “cure”.

Reading between the lines a more believable storyline might read:  Dad is obese and has bad arthritis in several joints which has a variable but increasing effect on his mobility.  For the last couple of weeks it has been especially bad, leading him to believe he is in a rapid terminal decline.  Last Monday he was visited at home by a new female GP, who he obviously fancies and who told him that there was very little the NHS could now do for him. Immediately she left, Dad in a fit of anger lowered himself to the floor and pressed his fall alarm summoning an ambulance.  At the hospital his inability to describe his symptoms in a clear and rational way led to the clinicians not finding much and not knowing what to do next.  So he has been given a low priority and shunted into a bed awaiting a scan, which the clinicians have called “special” just to get him off their backs.

As a result of writing this the scan will probably reveal he really is very ill and will now stoically fade away leaving me filled with remorse.  Yeah, right!

I think this is called compassion fatigue.