A view from the other side of the abyss

Some days are just not meant to be good days. I had been putting it off for a while, mainly because I just hate this sort of shit, but I had to go into the hospital today to visit A. A is the father of a friend of mine, and he is a lovely, genuine, caring man. His wife died last week, followed in short succession by his son, and that sort of sent him over the edge. He’s currently in the geriatric rehabilitation ward of the QC Hospital here in Ottawa. And as if all the other crap wasn’t enough, today he had to put up with a visit from me.
 
First of all, I am allergic to hospitals and essentially have mental anaphylaxis in old people’s homes. So, the idea of an old people’s home in a hospital is enough to send me over the edge too. Nonetheless, forth I sallied. The place was worse than I imagined: two to a room, nurses overrun with tasks, paperwork, dealing with the elderly and infirm. And in the middle of this was A. I’d heard from his daughter that the morning tended to be better than the afternoon, but not to get my hopes up too much. But there he was, standing at the entrance to his shared room, physically much as I had seen him a couple of years ago. He recognized me, thankfully, and apart from a couple of diversions into a place that is not on this plane, was lucid and coherent. There were a couple of moments when I wasn’t sure what was going on – even if he seemed confident enough – and he veered between the teary and the stoic.
 
Then, he heard a message over the tannoy and said “that’s for me” – and off he went, trying to find a doctor to whom he had to report information. I waited for 5-10 minutes, then decided that it was probably time to go, and found him just outside the room, waiting for the doctor, as he had been when I first arrived. What a mess ageing is. What a completely unfair mess. Hopefully, A will have suffered a bit of a breakdown and will regain his equilibrium. He may be in his 80s, but he is as trim and as agile as he was when I first met him 25 years ago. Surely, that has to count for something?
 
I drove home in a real funk. If I start to go, I am heading for Dignitas, the indignities we impose on the elderly are just not on. Sterile, soulless rooms. It’s absolutely shite.
 
I couldn’t even count on Liverpool to cheer me up. While Mrs Ottawacker took Ottawacker Jr to the doctors – we got the referral for an ultrasound for his elbow – I sat through more abject misery as the Reds lost against Everton. Everton. FFS, Everton. That’s like Tyson Fury being beaten in a fist fight by Jimmy Krankie.
 
Tonight, I am going to get shitfaced. I am going to sit with my family, gush about how wonderful they are, let Ottawacker choose a movie, and see how much damage I can inflict on a bottle of wine. Life is meant for the living of it.          ***
 
Postscript: Of course, it was never going to be that simple. Having wandered down the stairs, greeted my family with a suspiciously jaunty smile, continued down to the basement to the wine “cellar”, come back up, selected a glass and corkscrew, and then uncorked the bottle, I dropped the bottle. Miraculously, having broken its fall on my foot, it landed perfectly against the bottom of the stove, where the bottom of the bottle sheered right off. The red wine, a very nice 2015 Bordeaux, spread like a blood stain in a crappy American cop show all over the floor. I stood there, open-mouthed, while Mrs Ottawacker, who had just prepared and served dinner, looked at me with one of those looks you see in a crappy American cop show just before a blood stain spreads all over the floor.
 
“You’d better get those jeans into soak before the wine sets,” she said. And then got the rags from the basement and started to clean the floor. This I did, but only after putting the cats on the back deck. 

A feline attack on the dinner plates would have been one insult too many.