#and then my dad came home and i explained the situation. showed him the fda article i tried to show my mom.

[kissingwookiees]

todays argument with my mother: mom got a bouquet. very pretty. noticed it had three lilies in it (very small part of the bouquet but we have a cat in the house) and reminded her as i have a thousand times before, that lilies are incredibly toxic to cats, hadnt even suggested removing the lilies yet... CUE THE FUCKING SCREAMING. her telling me she doesnt care if my cat dies and actually the only reason im bringing this up is because im JEALOUS of her getting a bouquet...

[sage-nebula]

I wasn’t okay with talking about it much before, but now that things are looking a little better I think I can. Putting this under a cut, do not reblog it or I will delete it.

Basically what happened is, my parents are staying in Florida for the winter. (They have a place down there.) They left to Florida last Monday, both feeling a little under the weather. On Tuesday I came down with an illness myself, but I’m fully vaccinated against both covid and the flu so I didn’t think much of it.

Note: My parents are not vaccinated despite me telling them over and over again that they should be, especially since my dad is pretty old and has compromised lungs due to years of smoking.

Fast forward to this week. I’m mostly over my illness by this point. My mom asks if she can call me, I say yes. She calls me and tells me that they both tested positive for covid and that my dad is really, really sick. As in “has been in bed for 20 hours a day for the last four days” levels of sick. She also tells me that he refuses to go to the hospital. Why, I don’t know. My guess is that he was afraid of being put on a ventilator, but as I explained to my mom, ventilators are for people who can’t breathe on their own and are basically already dead (like your odds of survival once you’re on a ventilator are very low). The best way to ensure you get on a ventilator is by not seeking treatment before you get that bad. She agreed with me but said that he still refused to go to the hospital, that he’d had a fever for four days straight, that he couldn’t get out of bed, she had to force him to drink water, etc. I pleaded with her to tell him whatever she had to in order to get him to go to the hospital. She said she was trying and the call ended.

Well, I didn’t know when they had contracted covid, but since I was sick shortly after they left I went to the store and got an FDA-approved home covid test. I did both of the tests in the kit, both came up negative. So although I was sick, I didn’t have covid. This just goes to show how well vaccines work. If you haven’t gotten vaccinated already, get vaccinated. 

That said, once the thought that I might have covid wore off, I was left with the reality that my dad had been bedridden for days, was running a high fever, and was refusing to go to the hospital despite having a very serious and deadly virus. And I spiraled. I have a very complicated relationship with my father that I won’t get into here, but suffice to say that the thought that he could be dead in the next day or two hit me a lot harder than I thought it would. I cried, and cried, and couldn’t stop crying. I hadn’t cried that hard in seven years. The fact that I was furious that he was going to die of a totally preventable disease because he listened to faux news pundits who insisted the vaccine was dangerous / didn’t work / wasn’t real, and because he was for some reason refusing to go to the hospital, didn’t change that fact. Yeah, he deserved covid, but that didn’t mean I was okay with him dying from it. I don’t want him to die. I want him to live and be better.

But anyway, tl;dr, that’s why I was so upset on Monday. I was pretty convinced my father was going to die, and he was all the way in another state and I couldn’t do anything about it. I really needed comfort, but because of my current moving situation I’m kind of far from all my IRL friends (also it was really late at night, and on a work night no less). So I reached out here on tumblr. Thank you to all who sent nice messages, I really appreciate them still.

Anyway, today is Thursday and my mom informed me this morning that she finally got my dad to go to the hospital yesterday. Dumbass that he is, he wanted to leave after 30 minutes because they were taking too long to see him, but my mom is still sick herself (though not as bad) so she convinced him to stay by pointing out that SHE wanted the treatment, and as long as she was getting it, he figured he might as well stay and get it, too. So they both got antibody infusions (which incidentally means—and I verified this on the CDC website to make sure she wasn’t bullshitting me—that they can’t get vaccinated for 3 months, but the antibodies will protect them until then). They spent about 6 or 7 hours at the hospital, and honestly I wouldn’t put it past my father to sign himself out AMA (against medical advice), but she said that he didn’t have fever / chills today, so I think the antibodies are working. At least, I feel more hopeful today than I did earlier this week. I can probably keep procrastinating the eulogy a little longer.

Once again, thank you for all the kind messages you sent, and sorry for being cryptic about why I needed them. It’s just been a lot to deal with, especially since my own feelings were so complicated. But again, thanks.