cimorene

My dad was originally taken to the hospital for a wet cough and diagnosed with pneumonia, then further investigated and sent home when they determined it was actually influenza.

But a few days later he was back in the hospital from low blood oxygen, and they've x-rayed his chest a few times and now he does have pneumonia. He's been there almost a week now and my mom has been coming home only when my sister goes to the hospital a few hours to give her a break. He's been given oxygen a lot, and this helped several times, but because of the fluid accumulating in his lungs and the fact that he can't cough unassisted, this keeps leading back to low blood oxygen. The hospital is crowded and the staff is stretched thin, so nurses and doctors are slow to respond to pages, which has created a harrowing time for my mom - so much so that she forgot to tell us that he had developed pneumonia at all and my sister found out from a facebook post a few days ago (also an intermittent/impulsive occurrence: my mom is extremely ADHD), even though she's been there in person daily.

A few years ago I could have trusted my dad to remember that unless he was feeling really sick, but possibly he has been getting more absent-minded as time goes on. It must be more alarming being in a hospital right now than many of the times he has been in the past though, and it's possible his dislike for the discomfort of the oxygen mask is distracting enough to put any non-immediate concerns from his mind.

Strangely, hearing he's developed pneumonia after all didn't cause the same flood of adrenaline as initially hearing he had it before. He's in and out of the hospital so often that I'm afraid the whole process has become pretty routine for our family, and so has the level of anxiety and hecticness associated. That probably contributes to my parents' forgetting to pass things on. Being stuck there in the hospital room, anxious and never fully informed of exactly what's going on, and never confident how quickly you can get expert attention or how severe the whole thing actually is... it must sort of blur out into a surreal nightmarish Waiting for Godot sort of hell for them. And as we know, not only can humans grow somewhat accustomed to anything, any situation you put them in has the tendency to grow routine. The more times you walk across a street without getting hit by a car, the safer your subconscious thinks it is to be in the street, which is why the more times you go out in public and potentially expose yourself to covid but without getting sick the less scary it gets (even though the risk is independent and more or less equal each time - or rather dependent on how many enclosed spaces and other humans you encounter).