I Owe It To My Dad

jenakjar

I remember the day it all started. It was a simple index card with steps carefully written by my mother. Chronological ordered words instructed my 79-year old father on how to start his car and put it into drive. Those simple routine steps were fading away in his mind.

For over 35 years, he had hopped in his car, 6 days a week, to drive to his small retail men's clothing store for business. Once known names were slowly disappearing. Newly acquired memories were gone almost as quickly as they were experienced. I questioned the safety of my father driving to work when he needed written instructions to turn over the engine and put it into gear, but he was not willing to relinquish his keys or his freedom just yet.

However, soon thereafter, my dad became very ill with intractable diarrhea. He quickly became confused and unable to function in his weakened dehydrated state. His attempt to leave the house for work ended up with a trip to the emergency department. The following days were a chaotic blur of into the emergency department, back home, back to the emergency department, diagnosis of clostridium difficile, a cholecystectomy, saddle pulmonary embolism, and ulcerative colitis.

Finally, he was admitted to the hospital with a team of physicians frantically attempting to balance his precarious state of bleeding and clotting. I spent my days communicating with the clinicians about his bleeding bowel and his dropping hematocrit. I was, at that time, a weekend quarterback of nursing of sorts. I had always loved medicine but I had never pursued it educationally. Now, I was the designated medical intermediary for my father.

A colonoscopy would confirm an advanced state of ulcerative colitis with purulent and necrotic tissues in need of emergency excision. Post-operatively, an ileostomy saved my father's life. As he hovered in and out of consciousness on a ventilator, I hovered up and down the hospital halls praying for his life to be extended. In those dark, bleak hours and days and weeks that followed, I grappled with the meaning not only of my father's life but the purpose of my own.

As a divorced mother of a small child, I lived with my parents and became the caregiver, along with my mother, to my father. Nursing him back to health drew me further into the path I would follow going forward. Several years later I graduated in nursing and became a registered nurse.

My love for my dad certainly influenced my decision to change my course in life towards nursing. Nursing was an extension from my home into the workplace. The twelve years I was blessed to care for my dad and his many varied physiological challenges were the richest nursing experiences I ever had. Whether it was caring for his ileostomy, healing a wound, stabilizing him after an epileptic episode, or reminding him at 3:00 a.m. it was not time to go to Burger King, it formed my soul as a nurse. I would never see the world the same again.

I served as a hospice nurse for several years but in the final months, days, and weaning hours of my father's life, any preconceived notions I had about nursing and life were radically transformed. All the studying, all the early morning clinical rotations, all the late nights, and all the migraines came together in that moment. I sat next to him those final 48 hours as his life, as he wavered between this world and the next. I held his hand, I washed his feet, and I wiped his brow. I administered palliative medications to soothe his breathing and his terminal agitation. I cared for him as a nurse; I spoke to him and I loved him as a daughter and as a best friend.

His final breath forever altered who I was as a person and as a nurse. I would never see another patient simply as a patient, but as a friend, as a person loved by so many. Nursing has taught me so many life lessons, but the greatest lesson of all, compassion, I owe it to my Dad.

I Owe It To My Dad

About jenakjar

More Like This