Not really Gaming related, but., Me Sad Options

[hyzmarca]

My dad wasn't exactly into games. I tried to get him to play with me. He'd give it a shot sometimes, but would quickly lose interest and give up. Still, it's the effort that counts. And he made a lot of effort. He was the one person I could always rely on. The one person who never let me down.

For most of my life it was just me and him vs the world. I don't have many offline friends, he didn't either. A lot of people knew him and respected him, but he wasn't really close to anyone other than me. We were okay with that. We'd marathon Buffy together sometimes. We'd watch like the entire series in one sitting, with breaks to sleep and nothing else. That took about a weekn to power through a hundred hours worth of television. It was grand and glorious. It's been years since we did that.

On Tuesday June 24 2014 my father started gasping for breath and told me to call 911 because he couldn't breath. He was standing and walking when the ambulance arrived, but his heart stopped almost immediately after the paramedics got him in the back. They performed CPR for about 15 minutes and gave him drugs that eventually restarted his heart.

For three weeks he was stuck in a hospital bed, completely unresponsive. I tried to make up for lost time in recent years. I watched the Indiana Jones marathon on Spike with him. I spent about six hours a day in his hospital room. Which was pretty pointless because he wasn't aware of anything but it made me feel a little better. Saturday I told them to remove the breathing tube.

He was able to breathe on his own for about 10 hours. I had hoped to be able to take him home this week. It would have been difficult, but my local Hospice would have provided medicine and support free of charge. On around 3 AM Sunday morning, while I was asleep his heart stopped for a second time.

His nurse tried to contact me when his heart rate began dropping but I left y phone on charge in the living room. Which was probably a good thing in hindsight. I would have told them to put the tube back in and I knew he didn't want to continue living like that. I just didn't want to lose him.

He wasn't the best dad in the world. Not the richest or the smartest. But he was mine and I wouldn't want any other.