Writing Scraps

30. Hospital Stay | Nonfiction | Complete

Word Count: ~500 words
Time: N/A minutes
Genre: Nonfiction
Date: 8/11/17-8/15/17 (Fri.-Tues.)

30. Hospital Stay

Date: 8/11/17-8/15/17 (Fri.-Tues.)

On Friday, we got a phone call from the primary care doctor for my dad to go the the emergency room, so we went there and Dad got admitted. Over the next four days, Dad stayed there and got a catheter inserted into his penis, connecting his bladder to the bladder bag, and got an IV attached to his right arm. Mom and I stayed with him and only went home to check on the house and get the mail and eat dinner. On two days when Mom and I were at home, Dad got confused and started asking where we were and started pulling out the catheter and the IV, and when Mom and I got back, the nurses asked us if we were staying, and we said we were. They were calmed after this, because our presence calmed him down. On the first occasion at midnight between Friday and Saturday, we received a phone call at home that he had ripped out the catheter and IV, and so Mom and I drove back to the hospital in a panic, only to find out that he had pulled out the catheter and IV two more times after the nurses put them back in. We stayed up the entire night keeping watch over him on both sides of the hospital, my mom keeping him from pulling out the IV and me keeping him from pulling out the catheter. It was the longest night of my life, I'm telling you! On the second occasion when we had been gone for 5 hours (Mom says it's 4 and a half hours), he had pulled off the IV 3 times and tried to pull out the catheter, and when we got there, the nurses were asking us if we were staying, and we said we were, and they calmed down again. On both occasions, they put back the catheter and it looked like it hurt a lot, but the IV wasn't too bad. Anyway, we met a lot of nurses and staff and met some of the doctors, two of whom we met repeatedly (the kidney specialist and the bladder doctor) until Monday before Dad was released the next day to check up on Dad's progress to getting better. Finally, on the last day (Tuesday morning), we met the physical therapist who walked with my dad around the hallway on the 3rd floor, and Dad kept telling him of his years as a submariner in the U.S. navy during Vietnam, among other things, and I also told him that my grandfather (Dad's father) served in WWII and Korea in the army. Accordingly, I found out that the therapist also came from a military background in the army, and he thanked my dad for his service. It's nice knowing that there are a lot of good people in this world (both in the medical field and in the military).

THE END

(To be continued...)

A/N: After giving it some thought, I've decided to place this in this collection to let people know how hectic it's been on the second and third weeks of August.

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