Fall

On Tuesday February 22nd I received a call from my brother. This is unusual for a number of reasons, the first being that neither he nor my father ever call me. It always ends up being on me to call them to find out what is going on in their lives and update them on everything around here.

He was calling to let me know that our dad had fallen “a couple of days ago”, and that he was still hurting and having a hard time moving around. Apparently it had gotten to the point where my brother decided it was time to force something to happen. An ambulance ended up coming to the house and took dad to the ER. My father was admitted with a cracked rib, high blood pressure and his kidneys are not working optimally.

A week later he is still in the hospital. Right now they are working on getting his blood pressure under control and kidneys healthier before they send him to rehab to help get some more stability since he hasn’t taken care of himself post-stroke.

The house

When the EMTs removed him from the house, they filled a report with the office of aging. While I have not heard any follow-up on this yet, I know that they were told that when he returns to the house his bedroom has to be moved to the first floor. On Saturday we went down to help my brother work on cleaning things up to start the swap process. The bedrooms were mostly cleaned up, enough at least that they could be swapped if need be with minimal work.

The problem however is that I don’t know if he can come back to the house. The reason I say that is because the house is in such bad disrepair that I fear that if anything comes of the EMT report that the house could be condemned. I have mixed feelings on that. The first is that I don’t want them to be homeless, but I also feel like they are living in squalor and I don’t want that for them.

I wish they had learned from the last time they let their home get like this. As far as I know this is the third time it’s gotten to a state like this, however I believe this time is the worst. I want to help them, but I know deep down that I can only do so much, and that until they take the time to seriously address the root cause of why they let things get like this, anything I do only enables them.