I remember one night, in my early teens, and my parents were throwing a dinner party. I was helping the crone serve food when dad "went down" on the dining room floor. Guests were aghast, shocked and deeply concerned. God only knows what they thought. Why hadn't we called an ambulance?
We carried on serving dinner. Stepping over him, sprawled on the floor, still making small talk and downplaying the whole event.
To us, this was perfectly normal. In fact, it was pretty tame when you compare it with the hospital episodes that followed, some of which went on for three months at a time. ICUs and CCUs were to become like a second home to the withered one.
I can even recall using one such event to my advantage. I was 16 at the time and he was on the couch, recovering. It had been quite a bad episode and, as a result, the crone had to bring out the big guns and administer morphine to bring the pain under control.
I seized upon this opportunity to ask permission to go to a weekend music festival out of town. He was in Lala Land, so I got a "yes" when, under any other circumstances, I would have been given a firm "no". And, yes, I'm a little bit ashamed of myself.
I lost count of how many times the doctors told us he wasn't going to make it. But, against the odds, he did and, strange as it may seem, some of my best and fondest memories of my father came out of these most sobering of moments.
I went to visit him one morning in Wellington intensive care where, at first glance, he appeared to be quite lucid ... until he complained to me how the comatose patient in the next bed had kept him awake all night partying. There was little point in arguing, agitating him would serve no purpose so I just went with it.
That's when he told me the crone was having a lesbian affair with the ward sister and he had seen me with one of the doctors.
Next day, I got to hear how the hospital floors had opened up and magically transported him to the basement, where an artist was painting bunnies on the walls. Then he would stare out the window and point at the fighter jets that were constantly in his view. I don't know what meds he was on but I wished, just briefly, that I could experience his version of reality.
I recall the day he seemed particularly agitated. The crone and I were asked by staff to leave his bedside, and the curtain was drawn around his bed.
Next minute, his oxygen mask goes flying across the ward and lands on the bed opposite containing a man recovering from a coronary episode.
Voices are raised, we can hear a struggle taking place. A female doctor emerges, her face red from where my dad punched her. We're not overly concerned and neither is the assaulted doctor - she knows the man who hit her is not a true representation of the husband and father she is treating for neurological problems.
It's not that I'm cold and indifferent. At what I deem to be an appropriate time, I will break down and bawl like a baby. I guess that over time I was able to build up some kind of immunity that just kicks in, an almost automatic response to help me deal with such stressful moments.
My dad, of course, remembered none of these events, which makes me question just who suffers the most. The patient or the family?
These experiences have taught me so much. For starters, you don't need to be be sick or on medication to suffer from the side effects of illness, and even in your darkest hours - the ones that linger somewhere between life and death - laughter can be found and memories can be made, great memories. So often we tend to let our sympathy favour the patient, when the reality is that the suffering is far more widespread. So much so it can even alter your emotional make-up.
Kate Stewart is an unemployed, reluctant mother-of-three who can laugh even in the darkest moments. She can be contacted at investik8@gmail.com.
