Illness

I hired a car so me and my partner could drive up to Essex to visit my father in his residential care home. He was ninety-five and had pretty much given up on life. A couple of years before he was still driving and visiting his “old dears” in hospital. Many of these old dears were ten, twenty or even thirty years younger than him. Then a nasty fall and a couple of weeks in hospital completely knocked the stuffing out of him. He suddenly looked old and frail. He really looked like a man in his mid-nineties.

Soon after, my stepmother was diagnosed with throat cancer. She was only in her seventies. Two courses of radiotherapy failed to do much and she passed away well before her time. My father was heartbroken. And nothing was going to mend his broken heart. He did seems to enjoy my visits and, despite my own poor health, I aimed to get up to see him each month, an goal that I achieved more often than not.

I’d seen him get frailer and frailer and now he had a chest infection that just wouldn’t shift. My partner coming with me was her chance to say goodbye. For me, I would see him just one more time before he died. We got to my father’s room before we discovered that the home had an epidemic of norovirus. It was too late. We washed our hands and smothered ourselves in antibacterial alcohol gel, but we got sick the following day.

Coping with simultaneous vomiting and diarrhoea is something I’ve mastered over the twenty-five years I’ve had Crohn’s disease. Without the usual agonising cramping and pain, norovirus was a breeze. I puked and shat for twelve hours and that was it. My partner didn’t find it so easy, but maybe it was a brief window into my world. After twelve hours of symptoms, it was just a case of rest and rehydration. Nothing compared with what my dad was going through, and for that we were thankful.

Is there are real cure for the suffering of the mind? We can cure most illnesses nowadays, but what is there for grief, for depression, for loss? I can take antidepressants, but I won't be cured from the pain I feel from time to time. There is no pill that makes me forget the past, or indeed some of the future laying ahead.

Medicine... I think of the word and see pills, I see syringes, oxygen masks, hospital wards. I see paramedics, heart monitors, nursed and plastic soles on shoes squeaking along clean floors. It's supposed to be a good thing, being able to cure our body and keep it going for longer than any of our ancestors. But if one is unhappy, if one has nothing to live for, then what is the point of medicine? Medicine has taken away choices. It's taken away the body's signals, its way of saying, "I've had enough. Let's turn the light off."

So much death in my head these days... Is it Christmas? Making me miss the people I've lost? I send out cards, reach out with my greetings, but the people I want to contact the most I can't send messages to. I think of my father, yet again. I think about him a lot during these sessions, then he'll disappear, buried by my everyday thoughts and chores. I come and sit here and reflect on how my thoughts have changed, how they used to be full of anger and venom; now they are full of pain, but a different kind.

I remember standing by one of his many rusty cars one year, on Christmas Eve. He had just come back from one of his disappearing acts, full of promises of a normal Christmas. To him, a normal Christmas meant presents under the tree and decent food on the table. But his promises were always empty. We had nothing. Standing by the car with him, the dark starry night above us, all he said was, "It hasn't turned out the way I hoped, " and I felt I had a lot, I felt him admitting a small failure was all the presents I needed.