Falling: thoughts on my father’s birthday

I wrote this on my father’s birthday in May 2024. I went to visit him in the hospital after he had a fall and was struck by memories of giving birth in the same building.

I started to write that today would have been his 75^th birthday, but today is his 75^th birthday. He’s still here with us. He’s still here.

Except he’s in hospital after another fall. He tripped in the bathroom and fractured his neck. He’s supposed to wear a neck brace for three months and nobody knows how we can persuade him to keep it on all the time, so he’s staying in hospital for now to be monitored.

If only we could stop him from falling. If only we could hold him still for his head scan. If only we could find a way to make him understand why he needs this uncomfortable neck brace. So many things are too much.

At home he always got up early, before my mother, before me when I lived there, or my brother and sister – he’s always been an early riser. Since his diagnosis with dementia he’s kept his habit of getting up early, pottering around, making breakfast, having a shower. My mother had to adjust some things for him, like replacing his ‘real’ coffee with simpler coffee bags, but it was important for him to keep these habits, to keep this independence.

But he’s been losing his balance and falling sometimes, and then there was this horrible fall where he lost consciousness. Nobody really knows what happened – my mother just found him on the bathroom floor. Now we’re wondering if we’re going to need to hire a care nurse as my mother can’t keep her eye on him 24 hours a day.

But for now he stays in the hospital while we monitor how he copes with the neck brace. There’s talk of respite care in a care home.

And today is his 75th birthday.

We’re not gathering for a family meal or going out to a restaurant to give him presents. He’s here in the hospital and all I can do is go to visit him with a birthday card he doesn’t understand and a cake he loves to eat. There’s still that. He still loves to eat

And I want to feed him up. He’s as thin as a rake as they say, and he really is. His legs have always been skinny and now they’re literally the circumference of a rake’s handle. The disease is eating up his body as well as his mind.

It’s eating me up too, I’m losing weight, “You look so well!” people tell me in code. A funny idea of what well looks like.

I visit him in the hospital where I gave birth to my second child. Just walking in at the main entrance jolts me back to hobbling in here in the throes of contractions.

There’s the wall I paused to lean against as the wave of pain crested, and an animal sound erupted from my chest and up through my mouth as passers-by averted their gaze. I was fully dilated on arrival, and I was rushed through to a birthing suite in a wheelchair once they realised that I wasn’t playing up the pain I was in.

It was in a room in this building where I tore off all my clothes and got down on all fours to push out my son, watched over by a midwife I’d barely introduced myself to.

I’m in a different part of the hospital now. I locate my father in a room with three other elderly men in varying states of awareness, constantly watched over by a nurse, a rotation of saintly nurses.

I gave birth in this building, I know what it is to lose control of your body, to be held hostage by your body’s demands. To be severed from reality and thought and to just exist in your sensations. But I came back from it and my father is still here.

He’s sitting up in bed staring into space when I arrive, no books or magazines or television to entertain him. Maybe he doesn’t need anything to entertain him, maybe I’m projecting. The beep beep beep of the keyboard tones on the nurse’s decrepit computer bothers my senses, the bright UV lights and tropical hospital heat. Does he mind?

Is he propped up on enough pillows, does anyone care enough about him when we’re not here?

He loves the food – nobody loves hospital food, but he does. He’s not making a lot of sense, his words don’t join together to form any recognisable meaning, but he mercifully seems to recognise me, or he knows that he knows me, and says “What a nice surprise!”.

He’s so much more affable than the man in the next bed crossly telling the nurse that she needs to lose a few pounds. I tell the nurse she’s amazing as I leave but it’ll never really convey the hugeness of what she does for him, for me, for all of us.

I walk out of the room, passing under the ceiling light that is wonky; my father pointed it out to me, it must have been bothering him as it now bothers me.

Put more money into the NHS, I beg in my mind as I walk out into the fresh air, eyes blurred with tears.