Not the Best Way to Spend a Sunday

Today - or yesterday, I suppose, by now - as usual, we went over to visit Grandpa for lunch.  He seemed unusually tuned out, even for his recent baseline.  He was too tired to eat lunch.  He was too tired to stand up, and too tired to walk.  He was too tired to answer if he was feeling tired.

We ended up taking him to the local ER to be looked over.

Sitting in ER waiting rooms is never fun.  People come and go.  Snatches of other people's lives drift about, while yours sits in limbo waiting for news that never seems to come.  There's always a fish tank, though this ER's tank was about the least impressive saltwater tank I've seen in a medical facility.  There's always a TV, tuned to a station you would never watch in a million years at home but which keeps drawing your eye nevertheless as the hours crawl past.  A line of vending machines beckons with suspiciously unhealthy fare, and even books and playing cards.  I wound up buying a word search, not just to have something to do but because I was fascinated by the idea that I could buy a book from a vending machine. (Why don't we have something like this at work?  It could revolutionize the library business!  Or maybe not...)

We wandered down the hall, past pictures of rich people who enjoy having their photographs taken and nature images placed where few people will be able to properly appreciate them.  A small gift shop - closed at this hour - sold expensive handbags and jewelry in addition to junk candies, stuffed toys, and other generic cheering-up treats.  I had to wonder at the kind of person who, lingering in a hospital, thinks to buy a designer handbag and gold necklace.

It was hours before we got word back.  Grandpa's problems seemed to stem from bad dehydration.  In all likelihood, he's been ill and hasn't been willing or able to tell anyone. (Grandpa has been losing his words over the past few years; the synaptic connections between thought and speech just don't seem to work properly anymore, and as hard as it is to get any member of this family to speak about anything important, it's been exponentially harder to get him to engage in conversations longer than a half minute in duration.) The CAT scan ruled out a stroke - which we'd feared, given his sudden drop in activity level and inability to walk properly, not to mention waking up from his day-long doze in a state of evident agony yet being unable to recall pain when asked about it immediately after the fact - and all other tests were apparently normal.

So, despite the fact that Grandpa cannot reliably get out of his own chair anymore, the hospital sent him home for the night.  My uncle will likely be staying with him tonight and tomorrow.  After that... well, I think this proves that his days of living alone are over.  We've all known it was coming, if he lasted this long, but it's still a bit of a kick in the gut to actually see it dawning.

All in all, not the best way to spend a Sunday.