My father had his right leg amputated last week, and he's been a pain in the ass ever since. My father has been an asshole his entire life. He was a physician, and he stomped around his hospital, an angry little man, cornering nurses in private and chewing them out so thoroughly that their cheeks were still flushed when they got home. He made lots of them cry. I worked at that hospital a few summers as the chief mahoot, and the hostility that greeted me when I first started working there because he was my father was beyond belief. I spent the first summer trying to defend him, but realized that it was indefensible - I certainly did not enjoy being the subject of his absolutely out of control wrath - and gave up.
So my father had his right leg amputated last week, and he's been a pain in the ass ever since. To be perfectly frank, he's been a pain in the ass since he called in the beginning of the summer and announced he was having his big toe amputated. Each of his surgeries had to occur on a Friday, knocking out the planned weekend at the beach. Getting him to the hospital was hellish. We walked into the house to find that he had fallen, upstairs, next to his bed. His house was a fucking disgusting mess. He had had grab bars installed up the stairwell and down the upstairs hall to his bedroom, and getting up there at night and coming down in the morning was a terrifying high wire act. He smelled bad, and his clothes were filthy.
Before the first surgery, he discussed his 'bucket list' gleefully. True to form, one item on his bucket list was to chew out a doctor who had paid him some imaginary slight 20 years ago. He asked me if I would pursue it, and I told him I wouldn't. He looked puzzled when I explained in response to his question that it just wasn't worth the effort. Of course, he called, and of course the doctor had died five years ago. And I thought: what kind of monster has "bitch out Dr.Wilson" written in his list of things to do before he dies?
He wanted to have a big family conference before he had the first surgery, but neither my brothers or I was interested so it didn't happen. He told me that he was sorry to have been such a shitty father; that he didn't even realize he was being a shitty father; and that "he did it all for [us] guys." I just told him to worry about getting well because I didn't want to talk about it. His apology was insincere, I knew, though I did enjoy the Jewish guilt he hung on the end of it.
After his first surgery, he went home instead of to rehab. I had my maids try to clean his house; after three days of work, they quit. The air quality inside his house was very, very poor after they vacuumed, and it made them sick. Hell, it made me sick too.
So his foot got infected at home, and they brought him back into the hospital and lopped off the front part of his foot. The nursing home at which my mother resides refused to take him because he had been abusive to every single staffer at the place. I told him of their refusal and their reasons, and he began talking about how "all of those incident reports were bullshit" because they did not reflect his side of the story.
It was then that I told him that he could not be verbally abusive towards the people who were trying to help him. I told him he did not have the right to yell at anyone, or make them cry, or make their cheeks flush when they got home. He replied that he paid them good money and he was entitled to scream at them when they fucked up. I told him that it was very sad that a man his age didn't know how to act, told him that I was done because he was never going to change, and I walked out on him.
I didn't see him for a few weeks. Various rehab institutions called to advise me that he had checked out against doctor's advice. I declined their invitation to speak to him or pick him up. The hospital called to tell me he had checked himself back in. I asked them what they wanted me to do about it. They said he needed family support, and I told them that he was alone because he wanted to be alone.
Then he called my wife and told her they were going to amputate his leg. He demanded a meeting with his three sons before the surgery because he wanted to dump his bookkeeping on us. We decided before the meeting that we weren't going to help him because he was abusive.
But when we walked in, he looked so sickly that we all thought that we ought to help him. We left the room while he took a shit, and we all agreed to help him, and carved up responsibilities. We also agreed to tell him that we would quit if he was abusive to us.
So we walked in and sat down among the shit stink that lingered in the air. Being the middle son, and the son he never listened to, I outlined the division of responsibilities and then asked him to behave. And boy he was launched. He screamed at me (and I told him this was why I asked him to behave), then disowned me (and I told him that was perfectly fine) , then started bawling like a boy (because he said he had nothing to hold over me), then threw us out of his hospital room. My older brother stayed, and my father yelled about me for a half hour.
And so I was admonished by my brothers for being unkind to the old man.
So the old bastard had his leg chopped off. And I made it a point to visit him daily, which he seemed to appreciate. And it came to pass that it was time for him to leave the hospital, and they found him a bed in the best rehab place in town, and he refused to go because he did not think he was ready. And they kept the bed open another day, and he refused to go, cursed out the hospital social worker, and threw her out of his room.
Then he called me, angry as hell, and told me they were putting pressure on him to leave when his doctor said he could stay for a few more days. And I thought to myself why is my father acting like the hospital is a Riveria resort hotel? I called his doctor to report his distress, and he interrupted me and told me, quite coldly, that he was going to talk to my father and convince him to go to rehab at the best rehab facility in town.
My father called my older brother and told him he was going to the best rehab place in town. He was actually excited, my brother reported.
Well, the room at the best rehab facility was not open any more. And the hospital social workrr, who my father cursed out, booked him into the worst nursing home in town - a place my father had sworn he would never go to consistently during the 50 years I had known him - and when the ambulance picked him up, they took him to the nursing home - which was expecting him. And she didn't tell him he was going to the nursing home. She didn't want to see him again, much less talk to him.
And I thought to myself: Could you really blame her for fucking him over?
She fucked him over good, too. Since you cannot transfer a patient from one acute care facility to another under Medicare regulations, he was legally trapped at the shitty nursing home. He told me that he had been sent to the wrong place at midnight last night. I called the supervisor of the hospital's social services department first thing in the morning, spoke to her and told her that my father had not consented to go to the shitty nursing home and that, in fact, no one knew he was going there, and she said she would investigate and call me back.
My father called me and told me to sue the hospital. I am a lawyer, and my law firm represents the university that owns the hospital. In fact, one of my partners is the Chairman of the Board of the university. So I told my father that I could not ethically sue the hospital. I'm not even a litigator. My father got angry, told me I wasn't doing shit, disowned me again, and asked for my older brother's cell phone number. I told my father to look it up in the goddamn phone book, and hung up on him.
The supervisor called back and told me precisely what had happened. I apologized for my father acting like a horses ass, and politely leaned on them to fix their mistake. After all, they hadn't even told my father where he was going. They looped the nursing home's social worker into the call, and she said that Medicare prevented them from transferring my father to the best rehab place in the city, where he thought he was going. I politely leaned on them again, and they called back with a room in the best rehab place in the city that would open up on Monday.
So I called my father, who cursed me until I told him what I had arranged. I told him the nursing home social worker would be by to talk to him about it, and that this was the best I could do. He said he would listen to what she had to say, and hung up.
An hour later, my older brother called my father. My father told him that I had not done shit, and should have gotten him admitted to the best rehab place in the city now, on Friday afternoon, after five o'clock.
I don't feel any better after writing about this. I don't really know why I wrote about this, except that dealing with my father has fucked up my entire summer. Everything has been extremely difficult because he keeps cussing out the people he wants to help him, and then they try to fuck him over. And since he's a octogenerian gimp fuck, they can.
So welcome to my life. C'mon in. Take your shoes off. Come set awhile.
