New Layout Design And Something Of A Wakeup Call

This is likely to be a mixed bag of a blog and more than a little self indulgent.

Firstly I thought I ought to apologise if anyone has been getting repeated blogs from me today. I decided to change the layout to one of the newer more cleaner designs yesterday and spent a little time last night and on into this morning faffing around trying to get everything to fit onto the page nicely. Youtube links for example have had to be widened in order to centralise them properly which has suddenly made me realise quite how anal I can be about such things at times! Anyway, thankfully I've not been blogging for years, nor do I have a huge followers list so it shouldn't go on for too long nor affect the reading list of more than a handful of people.

Now onto more serious things.

Last Friday my father was taken into hospital. For the last two or three years he's been suffering from congestive heart failure which has unfortunately now got to the point where his body backs up with fluid due to his hearts inability to pump blood around his system properly. This puts pressure on things such as his lungs, affecting his ability to breath without the aid of an oxygen machine which he's plugged into almost continuously. Friday things had got so bad that he was literally 'leaking' excess fluid from his legs so he was taken off to our local hospital in an ambulance in order to drain over 17lb's of this fluid from his body. The third time in as many years this has happened.

The Dr's this time around have been extremely blunt with my father and it appears his heart is now too damaged for them to consider any treatment other than making him as comfortable as possible in 'the time he has left.' A bit of a shock to the system as I'm sure you can imagine, as was my mother being told quietly as an aside that if my father has a heart attack now, no attempt will be made to revive him as it would be considered cruel to prolong his suffering. His heart just isn't able to take much more. So it appears he's now living on borrowed time although true to form nobody seems to be able to predict how much longer my father has to live. We literally don't know whether we're talking weeks, months or years here. It's probably better that way.

My father, a previously strong and extremely active man, remains stoical about it all. He's 78 and in his own words, 'has had a good life filled with love and laughter.' My mother, who's been with my father since she was 13, is a little less so, and is presently living on something of a knife edge, as she has been really since my father first became ill. He is her first and only love. At 47, I suddenly find myself having to face the very real prospect of losing a parent. Which makes me almost feel like a little girl again, vulnerable and in need of.....well, I'm not entirely sure what really. My head tells me one thing my heart another.

I was talking with Ian about all this over the weekend. His father died of a ruptured aorta suddenly at the age of 61. He was close to his father and whilst obviously extremely upset at the time now thinks it was maybe kinder for him to go that way rather than in the manner of this long drawn out process my father is having to endure. We're all aware that there's going to be no happy ending...

Gah! I have no clue as to why I'm writing all of this here other than as something of a cathartic process. I might leave it up or I might very well take it down in a fit of embarrassment at some later date. I hope anyone reading this will understand if that proves to be the case.