This past week, my dad had to spend a couple days in the hospital. His cardiologist had put him on a new blood pressure medication, which exacerbated fluid retention that clearly was already occurring. He went to the cardiologist because for the first time in his life, he was having trouble with blood pressure.
For the first time in my life, today, I went with my dad to one of his doctor’s appointments. He was following up with the cardiologist after his hospitalization.
The doctor let him know that he now has congestive heart failure, And that he needed to be on higher doses of diuretics, to counteract the effect of the congestive heart failure.
The challenge was the doctor asked him to avoid hiking alone while we were working on titrating the amount of diuretics he needed. But Dad has a very strong need to hike alone, so this was not received particularly well.
I decided to try for a compromise, and asked dad to stick to hiking in places where there was clear cell phone coverage. It took some vigorous advocacy on my part to get him to agree to this.
It was the first time in my life where I have felt like the parent with respect to my dad. This is an odd new feeling, and I needed to record the day it happened.
