Fighting

As the hardest week of my life drew on I found myself getting into a sort of weird, morbid schedule.

6am- get up, shower, get dressed and collect any paperwork, legal documents or other things I needed for the day.
8am- arrive at the hospital to being my daily shift of staring at my father's lifeless body in the oversized hospital bed.
11am- have lunch with my grandmother who was also at the hospital daily, religiously, as I was
1pm- return to my father's hospital room for another shift
4pm- leave the hospital with my grandmother, and other family members or friends who have come to visit after work, for dinner.
6pm- return to the hospital room and update the new shift of nurses on what has been happening...or not happening as is more relevant
8pm- return home, exhausted, dreary and utterly spent.

Of course there would be days here and there where I need to go to the courthouse to file guardianship papers for my father, or to meet with the Police Department about the case.
The police still had not charged the offender as it had only been a week and things were still very uncertain.
My life remained very routine and dull and depressing for these few days after my father's brain surgery. There would be moments of hopefulness when we would see him move every so slightly, just to have our hopes dashed when we were told the movement was nothing more than muscle spasms that naturally occur.
My mind flashed to the horrible stories you hear of corpses moving in their caskets at their funeral. A mouth flying open, an eye-lid coming unglued.
I swallowed.

As the days wore on, so had my patience with my boyfriend. While he had been up to the hospital with me on many occasions and had done the best he could to be supportive, the fact that he remained young, immature and ultimately selfish became more and more evident. I would discus our problems with my mother and she would tell me that times like these test a relationship and many people break up when horrible things happen.
I didn't want that to be the case. I loved him and I knew he loved me.
But, I was constantly disappointed in his level of support. On the weekends when he wasn't working he would agree to go to the hospital with me. I would drive to his house to pick him up and instead of being awake and dressed and ready to go...he would still be sleeping.
So there I would sit waiting for him to get ready wasting what I thought could have been the last few days of my father's live, waiting for him...again.
This happened on a few occasions and as horrible as it sounds I eventually got to a place where I stopped expecting his help or his support. It was just easier.

In those days I also learned many things about my father. What company he had kept, what problems he had hid from me and what things he did on a daily basis.
I learned that he routinely went to shoot pool after getting off of his night shift at noon. He would go, along with several work friends, to shoot pool and drink pitchers of beer and harass young waitresses.
Then, irresponsibly, my father would drive back to his suburban ranch, eat dinner, watch some TV and fall asleep...just to begin the process all over again.

My father had been dating an ex-stripper I had met briefly a few months earlier, but from what I could tell and what my father had told me recently, they were no longer close and he didn't think they would be again. She visited him many times in these first few days along with her mother and sons.

Many people visited my father.
Nothing like being in a coma to bring everyone out of the woodwork who ever cared about you.
I was proud and honestly surprised by the out-pouring of visitors- there were many.

Another inevitable occurrence that happens when one finds themselves as ill as my father was, your family gets to know your deepest, darkest, personal business. Your affairs are now left in their hands, as my father's affairs were left in mine. I found out he was thousands of dollars in credit card debt, he had a nasty habit of eating cold vegetables out of the can, he never cleaned his house and he kept every, single thing I had bought or made for him since I was a little girl.
Seeing a craft I had made in kindergarten displayed proudly on the entertainment center brought me to tears.
How can one man be such a contradiction? How can he be cold, yet loving. Chauvinistic yet protective. Idealistic yet delusional. Happy yet haunted. And now alive but not among the living?
But, my father had always been this way. He has an irreplicatable charm that drew people to him, yet a way about him that pushed people away. He was a man people didn't want to like, and couldn't help but like at the same time.

His addiction to alcohol, beer specifically- Bud Light or Labatt Blue, was what took an otherwise handsome, charming, charismatic man and turned him into a rude, bloated, chauvinist. This addiction played such a role in every one's lives around him that there were few family members he was still close with, and those were usually the ones that would love him regardless of what he said, or did.
Like me.

On the fifth day post surgery an amazing thing happened. I was returning for my usual daily stay at my father's bedside when his nurse entered. I sat there with my boyfriend by my side, holding my father's hand.
"Well we had quite the occurrence last night didn't we," the nurse said as she entered the room looking at my father, who still lay lifeless and unmoving on the hospital bed.
"Occurrence?" I asked, looking to my boyfriend, who shrugged.
"Linwood decided to sit up and ripe all of his IVs out last night," the nurse continued, "And I got in here just in time to hold him down before he riped his catheter and feeding tube out."
"What?!?" I exclaimed, "How could he do that? I thought he was in a coma?"
"Well he is in a medically induced coma," the nurse said shaking her head, "we want him to heal for at least another week after his extensive surgery, but it seems his body is not as reactive to the sedation as most people, so we are giving him twice the normal dosage now," she continued, "he had quite the tolerance for drugs."
I looked at my boyfriend, he smirked, "you can say that again," I mumbled.
"Yes, yes," the nurse said softly as she walked around my father's bed checking his intervenous lines and stats that still shone on the monitor above his bed, "I believe he is going to be quite the handful."
And with that the nurse left.
Quite the handful?
Going to be?
Was my father going to make it? Was this the first sign of him coming back? Was he alive in there and thinking and trying to come back to me?
I looked at my father lying there as the nurse slide the glass door behind her, he still lay as I had seen him the day before, motionless and breathing by the steady hiss of the ventilator. But there was something different about him that day. A color had come back into his face and his body seemed ready to move at any moment.
He's in there, I thought.
He's fighting.
He's alive.