“Oh my Papa” : What Happened.
On August 27th my Grandfather passed away. There’s many things I want to write to make sure he is appropriately remembered and so I can come back to the post and hopefully one day smile in recollection.
Now though there is only sadness, and I cannot find the words required to do him the justice he deserves. So I will keep THIS post short and convey some of what happened. I will come back when the black cloud has started to dissipate to really try and capture what he meant to me and my family.
Papa was taken away from us suddenly after complications arose from what can only be characterized by a mistake by a doctor. He was given an unusually high dose of a, we now know, potentially dangerous medication. He took this for six months without any monitoring or warning from the doctor. The damage done to his lungs was something he could not fight back from, despite his very strong efforts in the last month.
On August 10th, after spending two weeks up north with us on our annual family vacation (thankfully due to my current employment situation I was able to be there for the full two weeks) our family doctor thought he had pneumonia so he sent him to the hospital. Within three days he was moved to the ICU where he put up a hell of a fight for the next two weeks. Within 24 hours of being put in the ICU a doctor spotted the irregular dosage and use of the medication in question and put an immediate stop to it.
We were told at this point he was now on a long road to recovery. The medication would slowly leave his system and the damage to his lungs would begin to heal. We visited him every day (my grandma not missing a minute of visiting hours) and we thought we’d have our Papa back within maybe not weeks, but months.
This past weekend we made a call to go up north and start packing down my grandparents place. It put us 3 hours away from the hospital. What could go wrong? Papa was recovering.
After bingo on Saturday and just before we headed in to town to have some Dairy Queen and buy some lotto scratcher tickets the phone rang. Papa was dying. We likely wouldn’t make it back to the city.
We rushed back to the city, holding out some hope. By the time we arrived (two hours to the hospital by the way, on a three hour drive. We moved.) he had already left us.
There was nothing for us but a giant hole in our world.
I come from an extremely close family. Papa has been part of my daily life since the day I was born. I was lucky in that.
Our closeness amplifies the loss in ways I couldn’t imagine before this past week. Our family’s collective being has been weakened and somehow we all know nothing will ever be the same again.
But we will go forward. That’s what he’d want. That’s the best way we could hope to honour his memory.
More to come…