He’d wanted to return home after leaving rehab, but by this point there was no way he could continue to live alone. One affected his peripheral vision, and another his short-term memory. Over the next week, he had a few little strokes, the sort people don’t notice right away. On the morning he was moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, I was on my way to Ann Arbor. On the night that my father fell, I was in Princeton, the fourth of eighty cities I would be travelling to for work. That was the hard part for everyone-seeing him so confused. I think he thought this was just some guy he was talking to.”įortunately, he was lucid again by the following afternoon. Then he got mad and said, ‘You’re sure asking a lot of questions.’ As if that’s not normal for a doctor. “Dad thought Lisa was Mom, and when the doctor asked him where he was he answered, ‘Syracuse’-where he went to college. “It was really weird,” she said when we spoke on the phone the following morning. At the hospital, they met up with our sister Gretchen, and with Amy, who’d just flown in from New York to attend the party, which was now cancelled. He fell again after they righted him, so an ambulance was called. My sister Lisa and her husband, Bob, dropped by hours later to hook up his new TV and discovered him on the floor, disoriented and in pain. The night before his ninety-fifth-birthday party, my father fell while turning around in his kitchen.
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