Unstuck in time

My father went into the hospital this week. He had a Urinary Tract Infection and an irregular heartbeat. They gave him antibiotics for the UTI, and they're sending him back home today. Usually the treatment for an irregular heartbeat is a pacemaker, but in Dad's condition, doctors consider him to be inoperable.

He has dementia, as I explained, and there's only one good thing about that: he doesn't know how restricted his life has become. Almost always he thinks he's at a different time in a different place. He's never really there. Past and present are overlapping for him. Usually, he thinks he's due somewhere else, like he said last weekend he had to go into the office, when he's been retired for over ten years, and the company he retired from has been gone almost that long. (The depended on Dad a lot.) But his wrong senses and memory are too compelling. This means he has a tendency to try to get up and go somewhere else. The problem is that he can't walk. If he tries, he's in serious danger of falling.




They're going to try to stabilize his heart through medications. Yet, I think it's the beginning of the end for my Dad. (As if dementia wasn't that already.)

His forays into the past remind me of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, where Billy Pilgrim gets "unstuck in time" and travels through his life at random, and finally into World War II where he witnesses one of the great atrocities of the war.

In fact, I now think Billy Pilgrim actually had dementia. I think Vonnegut hints at that at one point, where he calls Pilgrim a "senile old man." The story, and its random cuts through time, and the absurdity of the aliens all indicate this. Caring for my Dad makes me appreciate that book much more.

I should reread this book and see if my hypothesis gets stronger. BTW, I highly recommend it:



https://www.amazon.com/Slaughterhouse-Five-Kurt-Vonnegut-ebook/dp/B003XVYLDU/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485110170&sr=1-1&keywords=slaughterhouse+five