Intimations

It’s been an odd couple of days.

My dad went into hospital for an operation on Thursday and I was on tenterhooks waiting for news. I rang my mum at tea time and he still hadn’t come back to the ward from the recovery room and it looked like he might have to go to the high dependency unit overnight. It turned out that he had had a bad reaction to anaesthetic and was in a confused and delirious state, not knowing where he was or even if he had had the operation yet. Fortunately, by Friday night he was a lot better, and apparently the operation had gone as expected, so he should be out of hospital and back home in less than a week.

The whole episode gave us all a nasty jolt. I hadn’t realised quite how much I had been worrying about what should have been a routine procedure, and I couldn’t help all of the various ‘what ifs’ and ‘might have beens’ that went round in my head in defiance of any rationalisation. It is difficult to accept that my dad is getting older and more vulnerable, and that his lifestyle is going to have to change. I know that it has been a wrench for him to start turning down joinery work that he wouldn’t have time to finish before his operation, and he has a long period of recovery ahead.