My dad is in the ICU. And I feel as far away from normal life as I am from my home in Stockholm. Dad went into the hospital in December for five days and got out on December 21. Then he went back into the hospital again via ambulance on new year’s eve. On Friday January 5 just before six in the morning, we got a call from the hospital asking for permission to do an emergency procedure. That’s when things changed. It turns out that he had a hole in his bladder. The surgery went well and he was initially doing well in recovery. Then he lost responsiveness briefly and he’s been in the ICU ever since. We regularly get told that he is very ill. And we struggle to comprehend when doctors tell us that he might not make it through the night. Just as we struggle to leave the hospital in the night, staying, watching him breathe, willing him to live. Then we go to bed dreading a phone call. I call the nurse first thing in the morning, hoping that he had a good night, expecting that he did not. It feels like an eternity. The days both seem endless and also like they pass before I know it. It’s all consuming. And it’s also exhausting. But we keep on going. Every day is filled with new terminology and hard-to-spell medical terms to decipher and figure out what they mean. Just when we think we are making progress, that he is improving in some way, then we find there are several other issues to deal with. I am in awe of all the tubes, wires and machines that are attached to my Dad to monitor him, to give him medicine, to keep him alive. Yesterday when he … Continue reading Life changes, just like that