The Father Person

You can't really go home, but you can't really call Dad, either.

Pictured here: A scene from the 2001 Bandai animated dramatization of Guttermouth’s childhood.

Can you ask daddy if he's got time
To come and look at my front door?
It got slammed last night
And now it don't close right
And just promise that you won't tell him everything
And keep that pistol in the drawer
Mama, please don't say
I'm gonna laugh about this someday
You didn't see the way he drove away
-  Maddie & Tae, "Die of a Broken Heart"

Since the majority of you have found your way to the Gutter from my “valuable,” “interesting,” and “insightful” commentary around the stacks, you’ve probably heard me mention my father several times in reference to his recent troubles. Now that I’ve returned after a short trip to his home in NC to help him put things in order after his extended hospitalization, this seems like a good time to at least begin the long-awaited explanation of what’s up with Dad.

Let’s start with the present, because it’s most salient to anything you’ve heard me say about him, and I’ll work my way backwards from there depending on how self-indulgent I feel.

Here’s the super-short version:

• Dad stopped in to visit our farm on his way up to NY from NC to spend a few weeks with his girlfriend.

• The day before visiting, Dad ran into town to get his booster shot because a) Mouth Farms (not its real name) is full of The Unvaccinated and b) he was going to spend time in NYC, The City of the Walking Dead. At this point in time, dad thinks NPIs are ridiculous but is religious in his belief in vaccine efficacy, and the “they don’t stop transmission / but they reduce symptoms / prove it” Fathermouth vs. Guttermouth debate was formally made off-limits in the interests of civility several months prior.

• The morning after his arrival, Dad and Guttermouth take a walk out to the other end of the property to look at where the soybeans were (then) recently harvested.

• Dad collapses, falls straight on his ass, and says he can’t breathe and his legs have no strength.

• Dad recovers after resting on the ground for a few minutes enough to walk back to the house.

• Husbandmouth takes Dad to the nearest urgent care, where he is diagnosed with “sudden onset congestive heart failure.” He gets an echo and an xray, where they show that an atrial valve has collapsed and a mitral valve has lost tone such that it is now backflowing. Dad spent much of the past two years dealing with old knee injuries (a good story for another time) and prostate stuff, getting poked and prodded, and has absolutely no history of heart disease or injury.

• Urgent care tells Dad to go to the hospital immediately. Dad says “fuck no, NY has the best healthcare in the world, I’ll wait until I get there.” Dad stays 3 more days, drives up to NY, gets a second opinion from his local cardiologist, has dinner out with his girlfriend, and checks himself into the hospital.

• Dad has some kind of respiratory failure in response to sedation and gets put into a medical coma for two fucking days.

• Dad is brought out of the coma and given assisted respiration for a day or so (it gets chaotic at this point).

• Shortly after being roused and taken off of respiration, dad begins exhibiting extreme confusion and delirium (hallucinations). He becomes agitated, aggressive, and paranoid. THESE SYMPTOMS CONTINUE TO WORSEN.

• Guttermouth and the only attending physician (hell, the only person period) who returns calls embark on a diagnostic journey where we attempt to rule out Acute Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome (dad was a lifelong heavy drinker with long periods of alcoholism and had apparently just recently decided to quit); when his mental symptoms get worse instead of better, we go with Wernicke’s Encephalopathy. Someone suggests a clot happened that is now gone, but a CAT and MRI don’t show gross damage (though they are not good scans because dad keeps becoming agitated and they have to stop).

• Dad spends the better part of a month and a half in the original hospital under sedation, psychiatric meds (Depakote And Friends), tied to his bed, with blood thinners and beta blockers to keep his heart under control as his mental state make him “no longer a candidate” for heart surgery because he will be unable to comply with post-op care. Dad spends much of his time half or fully naked because he pulls or shimmies off everything on him including electrodes and IVs, often with a fair amount of poop involved.

• Dad does not know who anyone is who is visiting him except for fleeting moments if he’s told enough times, has absolutely no idea where he is, and rarely strings words together with any grammatic meaning, just a stream of word salad.

• Dad starts calling Guttermouth at about 2 or 3 in the morning most nights, stating that he is a) being held in a Navy prison'; b) being held ransom in a house by drug dealers or mobsters; c) in jail after a drunken brawl; d) on a train that they will not stop or let him get off, and so on, demanding that Guttermouth immediately show up and rescue him/call the cops/pay a ransom/ “bring your guns and extract me.” Guttermouth loses lots of sleep.

• By this point, dad is on 30+ medications, including competing psychoactives and meds for Alzheimer’s because someone wandered into the room for 5 minutes and saw the way he behaved and figured it was Alzheimer’s and made a note on his chart and billed for $1,500 every day for the next three weeks.

• Docs start telling Guttermouth that Dad is likely to continue to decline and will eventually probably lose consciousness and later die but this will take a long time, and to start looking into long-term care.

• Guttermouth gets a call stating that “we need beds for COVID,” and dad is “medically stable” and will probably never be a candidate for the heart surgery and so he needs to go, NOW, come get this sack of meat here or we’re going to put it out for the garbage.

• Guttermouth, Husbandmouth and Brothermouth quickly convert a first-floor room into a bedroom and get all the assistive equipment the hospital says he’ll need, drive to NY, and pick him up.

• At this point (and only at this point) we discover that dad is unable to walk, toilet himself, feed himself, or basically do any occupational activities, but now we’ve got a half-naked man in the car to stay at Mothermouth’s house for three days while we close on our house before driving back to PA.

• Dad at this point weighs 250 pounds and we are unable to lift him off the floor or out of a car. He spends two days lying on a mattress in my mother’s house, and the best we can manage is to turn him from side to side to try to clean him between diaper changes; we achieve vaccine-level standards of “effective” in doing so. I hand feed and groom him during this time; he responds to food and drink and states preferences including “where’s my coffee” and “give me a fuckin’ cigarette” but otherwise it’s word salad and he recognizes each of us only fleetingly if at all.

• Attending doc calls to see “how it’s going,” Guttermouth starts crying and sobbing and cursing, doc says “we thought you knew he was completely immobile, I never would have authorized this if I knew you didn’t have assistance,” tells us to get him readmitted under any pretense at all to a hospital he has privileges at and he’ll keep him hospitalized until we can come up with a plan.

• Dad has bad gout in one leg, apparently developed during the month and a half, and that will do nicely, so a hospital ride takes him to a new emergency room. Dad is admitted as Guttermouth narrowly avoids a fist fight with a nurse that is obsessed with keeping a mask on dad’s face which he keeps pulling off; arguments include “he can’t keep it on, he’s agitated” “this is a hospital” “he’s triple vaccinated, wasn’t that the fucking point?” “this is a hospital” “he has trouble breathing” “oh, then let me hook him up to oxygen right now [proceeds to stick tubes in dad’s mouth, run O2, AND put a mask on his face over it all] “get that fucking off of him right now” “this is a hospital and we’re in a pandemic” and a nice doc steps in to stop two women from trying to murder each other in front of a rambling semi-conscious man who has by now pulled the tubes and mask off his own face. (I swear to god if I’m ever back in NY and see her on the street and if I can recognize her face without a fucking mask on, that nurse will want to keep that mask on for the rest of her life and I’ll mail her the necklace I make of her teeth to keep as a fucking souvenir.)

• Previous attending doc miraculously finds a subacute rehab facility to try to get him enough PT that he can move about at home without 24-hour care even if he remains permanently demented. Dad is moved.

• After about a week in subacute care, the midnight calls begin again, and Dad becomes aggressive; he is sent to a psych hospital because he began trying to walk out of the place and started punching people; dad later describes this as a goon squad for some kind of forced confinement (which is basically correct) and “if I had some of those cops from the lobby of that other place with me we could have taken that whole fucking place.” I ask which psych hospital he is going to. I am told “it depends where the ambulance takes him, someone will call you.”

• [Morgan Freeman voice] Someone doesn’t call Guttermouth. A day goes by.

• Guttermouth calls rehab. “Oh, he went <here>.” Guttermouth calls. “There’s no one like that here.”

• Guttermouth gets a call from the subacute care by someone who barely speaks enough English to communicate effectively, which thus far has been about 75% of calls, asking dad’s food allergies. Guttermouth asks, “why the fuck are you asking me about food, he’s not in your facility anymore, I’m still trying to find where the fuck you put him.” For the millionth time, Guttermouth is told, “oh, I don’t know anything about that, I’ll have someone call you back.”

• Guttermouth drives to a lawyer to explore kidnapping charges before contacting the police. While at the lawyer’s office, a nurse sheepishly calls Guttermouth from the rehab facility to report that dad was there “all along,” he was apparently only at the psych hospital for a couple hours overnight for observation.

• Guttermouth gets a midnight call, this time from a nurse, that dad has low O2 and is becoming agitated when the nurses try to give him oxygen and he’s turning blue, can I please try to speak to him? The phone is carried about halfway (apparently) to dad’s bed before being dropped, whereupon Guttermouth hears dad screaming, “fuck you motherfuckers, I want to LIVE!” followed by lots of crashing and yelling, then “<Guttermouth>, I’m going for the door, get over here and help me!”

• Guttermouth later learns that dad apparently punched out a number of people while blue from hypoxia, including a paramedic, and when police arrived asked if they would take him in if he hit them “so I can get away from here”; when they said yes he booped an officer’s nose. He was instead taken to another psycho hospital where he disappeared, again, this time for just 24 hours. Dad later explains an incredibly dark and complex hallucination that was going on at this time where he and other elderly patients were lined up in a dark room and told they were about to be euthanized and to “not resist or it will go harder.”

• Psych hospital tries to return dad after observation and sedation; rehab says “fuck no we’re not taking this guy,” hospital sends him back anyway, rehab calls Guttermouth and says “we’re not admitting him, we’re still cleaning up from yesterday, come get him immediately because we’re discharging him.” Guttermouth reminds them she is a day’s drive away and asks if they are actually discharging an actively psychotic man to the street and wonders if he will just call a fucking cab and go take a vacation at a nice hotel somewhere and asks to speak to an administrator to discuss the roughly 30 megatons of pain she is about to drop on their facility. Administrator agrees that dad cannot be dumped on the street and Guttermouth has 24 hours to find another facility or pick him up, they really don’t care at this point, and how the fuck did someone this sick do so much damage, to which Guttermouth replies “we’re fucking Vikings” and begins looking for facilities.

• Guttermouth miraculously finds a facility in the Bronx willing to take dad. Transfer begins and dad gets bundled up for a long ambulette ride from Queens.

• Guttermouth gets a call from a young woman who states she was assigned to ride in back with dad, and he’s asking to speak to me, do I want to talk to him? Dad is handed the phone and in a perfectly clear voice inquires, “What’s going on, where am I and where are all my clothes?” He begins to have a perfectly lucid conversation lasting the entire ambulette ride, where he hangs off because “they’re asking me all these intake questions and they’ve got all my data wrong, but this place looks very pretty, the neighborhood is nice, I’ll call you back.”

• Guttermouth literally (not literally) fucking dies.

• Later that day rehab place calls, says dad is completely lucid and a joy and has had two PT sessions. Plans are made to pick him up ASAP as there is no obstacle to him recovering at home.

• For the next three days dad completely devolves, resumes 3am calls from the nurses’ station. He is vaguely aware of a discharge date but is constantly getting the days wrong, accuses Guttermouth of stealing his clothes and demands she show up immediately because, among other things, “I’m standing here naked in a room full of reporters and I’ll be dead within 24 hours and it will be on your hands” before hanging up.

• Somewhere in here dad’s girlfriend breaks up with him, through Guttermouth, by text.

• Committed at this point. Guttermouth drives up to NY with Husbandmouth and arrives to discharge dad, bringing a bag of clothes to send up. Dad comes downstairs an hour later fully dressed and completely lucid, and makes completely rational conversation the entire day-long drive back to the farm.

• Dad has now stayed here for almost three weeks, is completely normal and is having a generally very happy time recuperating here. He’s decided to take another shot at dealing with his heart issues here in PA with local healthcare and has been to several appointments.

• The day he arrived, Guttermouth laid out the 30 medications he was sent home with and took him off of all but 6. Several were redundant, several were obsolete (he was still on gout medication a month after being cured of gout) and several made no sense (Alzheimer’s medication and an incredibly high-dose nicotine patch when dad hasn’t smoked in over a decade.) At his first visit with a GP here, doctor looks at the original list of prescriptions, looks at Guttermouth’s abridged list, smiles, and nods. They remain unchanged.

• Dad has had several incidents where he has pushed himself to normal activity too fast trying to help with farm chores and becomes breathless or loses his legs, but is fine after a short rest. He is getting more reasonable about pacing himself.

• His mental status has been completely normal since arriving and has only improved; at the day of his discharge, he has ZERO conscious memory of any of the prior two months, last remembering his initial intake and vague fragments of the final combat in the rehab (now colloquially referred to as “the recreational facility” and the fight as “the street brawl”).

• His memory has been gradually returning in sudden flashes; he describes his periods of active hallucination as "feeling like things that actually happened because I was conscious and actually doing them, but also clearly not real.” He is depressed about his girlfriend throwing in the towel and has been dealing with it by writing her long letters, most of which are not sent. He is highly mentally active, catching up with his Rolodex full of friends and colleagues who all thought he was dead, binging Yellowstone and 1883, and reading novels.

• He is seeing a new heart specialist in about a week and intends to pursue surgical treatment for his heart depending on the risk profile; he isn’t interested if it requires a long inpatient hospitalization for recovery. I wonder why?

• We remain completely unaware of an actual, accurate diagnosis. After doing a bunch of research, I’m currently going with hospital delirium, which I previously thought was a lazy term describing something else, combined with serious mismedication as many of the meds I dropped him from included delirium as side effects.

• The Ass Crack Bandit remains at large.

• Epstein didn’t kill himself.

That’s the whole saga. Lots more about dad and the recent road trip to follow, not as a bullet list as it’s more reflective and interesting than simply “here’s the thing I’ve been talking about for months.”

Oh. And without any comment on having had a change of heart, on the ride home to PA, dad was and remains wholly of the opinion that the vaccines are a deadly disaster, the NPIs are soft totalitarianism, and the whole thing has been an unmitigated disaster and he is quite worried about the world I will live in.

More this week, including some cool new ideas for ongoing content. It’s been a busy time.