Downs and Ups

Blood was 5.8 this morning. No, I didn't drag my ass out of bed and go walk. No, I didn't get on the bike before work. No, I didn't get on the bike at all. As new starts go, it's taking its time to get going, fair play.
Weigh-in was 16 stone 6. Nearly at the half-stone marker. So it's decidedly, unmistakably up after the week-long binge.

On the other hand, I weighed yesterday, and came in at 16 stone 7 - so clearly, day 1 of Being Alone And Not Binging has had a beneficial effect.

Moving right along, went to see my dad at lunchtime. He wasn't there.

Which is to say, something was there, but it wasn't my dad. You know how when you go to visit someone in hospital and you walk past side-rooms with Really Old People in, and they're lying there, asleep in death-masque poses, mouth open, and the colour of the grave? And you always think "Poor sod...not long now..."

That was what was there. He looked frail and pale and brittle and old and defenceless and yellow, and all you wanted to do was cwtch him in his vulnerability, but you were afraid if you did, he'd snap.

We woke him up briefly, and he didn't seem terribly aware of where he was or what was going on. And he wanted nothing to do with any of it, with anything except sleep that looked too much like something not-sleep.

Went away, came back at 6 tonight. He still wasn't there.
Which is to say he'd been moved. From a kind of side-door Emergency Care section to a ward, a proper ward with a room of his own and a bathroom en-suite. When we went in, he was awake, and alert, and coherent. He'd lost a lot of the yellow colour, and he could speak. He'd been drinking water voluntarily and keeping it down. He was Dad again. He was himself.

Sure, he was himself still in some pain, and still in desperate need of sleep and fattening up, but he'd come back to us from wherever pain and infection had driven him.

He was having blood infused into him, and there was more to come, followed by another double dose of antibiotics tonight. So while he's still got a long way to go to be within yodelling distance of ticketty-boo, he's come back to us again from the grim yellow reaches of the afternoon.

And on we go, with a renewed sense of perspective, and determination not to let him down.