Like a cat in a bag waiting to drown

emotional 180 from yesterday, sorry

I went over to my parents' house yesterday and brought them a bucket of Church's fried chicken. I can't stand fast food fried chicken, but my mother loves the stuff. All I had was a small serving of mashed potatoes. I really haven't been eating meat at all lately. But I digress.

My father was obviously utterly off his head on some opiate again, muttering nonsense and pacing around in bewilderment. At 72, he's a bit old for these kinds of shenanigans. Lately I've been openly contemptuous of him, which I'm not proud of, but there it is. I've been dealing with his drug addiction for 38 years, and I'm sick of it and I'm sick of him being so whiny and self-centered. My mother, in contrast, has been showing great compassion. And that's totally Bizarro world, because my mother is far from empathetic as a rule. She thinks my father's not long for this world, so she's being a bit more tolerant than usual.

She asked me to walk him over to the little house because he was so shaky on his feet.

I refused.

I'm just not going to enable him in any way ever again. If he needs help because of something out of his control, great. I will do all I can to help. But he's stumbling and goofy because he's just snorted some fucking horse tranquilizers due to his inability to face life sober? Sorry. If he falls and breaks his arm, well then, maybe he won't be able to get high as easily. If he falls and breaks his head, maybe it'll knock some sense into him. If he gets in his car and wrecks it, no more car. And so on. It may sound vindictive and vicious, but it's the only way a drug addict's loved ones can keep their sanity. He is on his own.

And so of course this morning I was woken up at 8:00 by two of his AA buddies who'd noticed him stumbling around the street, taken him over to the nearby fire station to be looked at, and seen him off to the hospital in an ambulance.

I went to see him. They gave him at EKG and two CT scans, and they're going to keep him overnight. He still has pneumonia and a low-grade infection, and his blood pressure was totally crashed at 80/50. Mentally, he was still pretty goofy from the tranks; he must have taken more this morning.

The emergency ward was a bit of a shithole --- a bloody towel on the floor of his room (from where the nurses had, I'd assumed, dabbed off a wound he had caused by a fall), wrappers and straws on the floor, the doctor utterly unhelpful and barely present. He had to ask for water; it wouldn't have occurred to the staff. When I went to the nurses' station to say my dad needed to pee, they handed me a urine flask and turned away. Isn't helping patients with bodily functions more of their job? But I did it.

I stayed around for four or five hours, but there wasn't much more I could do for him, and I wasn't getting any good information, so I left.