A couple of days after his surgery, I could see my dad getting a little stronger every day. We decided as a family not to tell him about the cancer diagnosis yet — we wanted to wait for the right time. I already knew he wouldn’t do chemo. The man had the best hair of anyone I knew and he was well aware of it. More than that, though, he didn’t want to spend whatever life he had left sick from treatment.
Two days after surgery, he wanted me there constantly. Then he started telling me the nurse was trying to kill him. She’d spilled coffee all over him. She kept hitting him with things, he said. Before visiting hours even started, he was calling the house to report her latest “shenanigans.”
When I got there, he wasn’t wrong. He’d been moved out of the ICU to a new floor, and while I was visiting, she dropped a full pitcher of ice water on him. It was genuinely wild.
“Why Did God Tell You Otherwise?”
One of the doctors on that floor pulled me aside and told me my dad should be released the following week.
I asked him — will he still be alive? The doctor looked at me like I’d lost my mind and said, as far as he knew, yes — why would I ask that? So I told him what had happened with my dad’s other doctor, the “two weeks to live” call. This doctor said that was ridiculous.
I was thrilled. Relieved in a way I hadn’t let myself feel since that phone call.
Then he asked if anyone smoked in the house. My mom was about two packs a day of Virginia Slim 100s, and I was smoking Parliament Lights, so between the two of us, the house was practically a fire hazard. The doctor said everything needed to be washed, repainted, and every rug in the house replaced before my dad could come home to it.
Two Weeks, Two Floors, One Aunt Clara
I called my Aunt Clara in Toronto — the best sidekick and partner a niece could ask for. She packed up, got in the car with her dog Cody, and drove down from Canada in two days flat.
Together we stripped paint, ripped up rugs, tore off wallpaper — the whole house, both floors, in under two weeks. My dad wanted out of that hospital, and honestly, I didn’t blame him one bit.
We got it done.