Dad's fight... - Democratic Underground

Drunken Irishman

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue May-31-11 12:12 AM
Original message

Dad's fight...

Edited on Tue May-31-11 12:22 AM by Drunken Irishman

Memorial Day is a great day to remember those who were lost at war.

We often forget those who bring the war home with them.

My father, a Vietnam Veteran, was only sixteen when he enlisted in the United States Army to escape his difficult childhood. When he was five, his father died in a car accident, leaving his mother to raise eight children on her own - my dad was the 3rd oldest. At five. It was a burden that overwhelmed his mother and led to a broken home.

She refused outside help, specifically from my dad's wealthy uncle, and decided to try and raise all the children on her own. She wasn't capable and the home environment deteriorated at a fast pace.

My father was born to children of Irish immigrants. He grew up in a poorer area of Chicago - among other non-affluent Irish immigrants.

The family eventually moved out to Utah, where they settled in a poorer area of the city. For him, it was a difficult transition because the only semblance of a family was that of his mother's and they all lived back in Chicago.

So there was no home environment. His mother, who I have a difficult time even referring to as grandma, always treated my dad very badly. My mother thinks it's because, as he got older, he looked more and more like his father - the one who she never forgave for dying so many years before.

One Christmas, she returned home with gifts for the entire family, lined up all the children and handed them out one by one. She eventually got to my father, looked at him and said, "I didn't know what to get you, sorry..." and went on to his sister.

That's how it was growing up in his house. All his brothers and sisters, sadly, would become delinquents. They were heavily involved in drugs and crime and without any structure at home, they all kind of just gravitated toward the bad.

At sixteen, my dad finally decided he had had enough. He, with the approval of his mother, enlisted in the army and by his 18th birthday, was fighting in the jungles of Vietnam.

This is Dad at 17:

He never spoke of Vietnam. We never really asked him what happened there. He was a proud member of the 101st Airborne Division - but outside his pride for the military, he never went into detail about what he saw and what he did there.

At least not to me. I think my mom was the only person he ever told and the bits and pieces I got from her made it pretty clear why he kept those memories locked away in a deep, deep place.

I can't imagine the horrors he saw.

Dad returned home a shattered man. A lost man. He fell into drugs, specifically heroin, and nearly lost his life because of it. I'm sure he spent the remainder of the 70s in a drug stupor and even saw prison time because of it. He was not a perfect man. Like his brothers and sisters, he was addicted to drugs and it was ruining his life.

Unlike his brothers and sisters, though, he actually saw the horrors of wars.

That was his excuse. It wasn't a very good one and certainly not something I would accept today - but at the time, I guess it seemed passable. He did, after all, spend his late-teens in a foreign land killing people.

How does one cope with that?

As my dad found out, not very well.

But he didn't let the drugs define him. He came home, cleaned up and made something of his life. He met my mom, who was actually a childhood friend of the family, and they married and had me. I don't know the specifics of when Dad quit doing drugs - I do know he never did them after my birth.

Dad was a trucker for my early childhood. That I would go weeks without seeing him. But he did what he had to do to provide for his family. He was going to give my brother and I something he didn't have as a child - a family.

But like I said, Dad wasn't perfect. Dad might have kicked the drug habit, but he was an alcoholic. He was a violent alcoholic. I hated when he drank. I hated what it made him become. I hated his violent outbursts, and though he never would ever lay a finger on any of us, it didn't make his rage any easier.

For most my childhood, Dad kept the drinking to a reasonable amount. He would only go off the deep end maybe a few times a year - if that.

The older he got, though, the harder things became for him. Something wasn't right. He would easily forget things. He would feel numbness in parts of his body. He would have violent shakes while sleeping. No doctor could explain what was causing these issues.

My mom, bless her heart, decided to do her own research. She read up, a lot, on Agent Orange because she knew he had been exposed to it in Vietnam. Sure enough, much of the symptoms he was suffering from linked directly to Agent Orange.

Of course, trying to find someone to listen in the military back then was very difficult. They ignored it - said she didn't know what she was talking about. What he was experiencing was nothing more than getting old.

But we knew better. Finally, after a long and prolonged fight throughout the 1990s, it was determined my dad did suffer from Agent Orange. And the outlook was not good. He was told it was slowly killing him. Worse, it was shrinking his brain and that was the cause of his memory loss.

As he got older, his hair started falling out, he was constantly in pain and took enough medication to put down a horse.

He was also ruled 100% disabled by the federal government because of Agent Orange - so that shows you the seriousness of it.

His quality of life deteriorated the older he got. He had aged considerably, broke a hip, lost a great deal of weight and, sadly, became more and more an alcoholic.

Knowing his limitations and facing death was not easy. The problem was that around this time, my father started having dangerous episodes. He would have flashbacks to Vietnam and we finally found out that he was suffering from an extreme case of PTSD. He probably suffered from it most his life - but the older he got and the issues he had with his brain, the more aggressive the PTSD appeared.

The PTSD ultimately was triggered by alcohol. When he drank, he would become uncontrollable. He never hit my mom or me - but it got dangerously close between the two of us because I would always step in to protect her.

Over time, he finally realized the only way he was going to keep his disorder in check was by not drinking anymore. So he quit. It was not easy and there were times where we found booze that he had hidden, but for the most part, over the last five or six years, he kept his word.

Dad stopped drinking.

He stopped drinking and the emotional outbursts disappeared. His health, though, continued to get progressively worse. He had violet nightmares, uncontrollable kicking spells while he slept, and, a few years ago, suffered a massive grand mal seizure.

My mom and I knew we didn't have much longer. He was dying a slow and painful death. Everything that could go wrong went wrong with Dad. The doctors didn't even know what to do at one point because they didn't know what was going on with him. They knew he had an infection somewhere in his body, but didn't know what was the direct cause for it.

He had heart issues, there were cancer scares and a lot of pain. A lot of pain. Most of the last few years, Dad spent every second of it in pain.

And my dad had a high tolerance, so when he said he was hurting, you knew he was really hurting.

Back in November, my dad complained of chest pains one morning. My mom called 911 and they rushed him to the hospital. They did tests and ruled out a heart attack, but couldn't find what was wrong with him. The VA, after doing everything they could, released him from the hospital a couple days later.

Dad seemed fine when he returned home. I remember talking to him about the Utah-Notre Dame game, which had occurred the day he was admitted to the hospital. Everything seemed fine. He wasn't feeling chest pains anymore, he was still in pain, obviously, but he wasn't any worse than normal.

That Friday night, about a week after he was first admitted to the hospital, he started acting funny. My mom called me and I came over and we noticed that something wasn't right. He was very quiet, kind of sedated, and when he spoke, didn't make much sense.

But that wasn't unusual. Sometimes my dad's meds made him loopy and that's kind of how he acted.

About 30 minutes later, though, he called out to my mom and we both went into the the bedroom. He was sitting up, with his arms out in front of him like he didn't know where he was. I remember looking at his face and the coloring was just so awful. I had never seen anything like that in my life. My mom, of course, asked if we should call 911 and I told her yes, that something wasn't right.

He never really could say anything or even react as if we were in the room. He just kept moving his arms around in front of him like he was trying to see in the dark.

The paramedics got there and they knew it was serious. They thought they might have to take him to another local hospital instead of the VA Hospital because they didn't know if they had enough time. Unfortunately, that hospital had just received a bomb threat and they really had no choice but to go to the VA - which wasn't terribly far from my house, but this other hospital, St. Marks, was a bit closer.

So they took off. My mom and I did shortly after - she had to grab her rosary.

We got up to the hospital and this time felt different. I thought we were going to lose him. So I called my mom's sister and told her that I thought Dad was going to die. So she called her other sister and the family took off for the hospital.

Mom and I waited in the waiting room not knowing what to think. My dad had been taken to the hospital a lot over the years, so there was certainly a feeling of been here, done that... even if we knew this was a bit different.

Hell, there were times my dad went to the hospital unconscious and by the time they let us see him, he was sitting up in the bed lively as ever.

So when they took us into the back area of the emergency room and the doctor asked to speak with us in a smaller room, we knew something was wrong.

He told us that my dad was not conscious and they weren't certain what was going on. My mom asked if he was dying and the doctor essentially said yes - but that they would keep monitoring things and see if he could pull out of it.

My mom then went into visit with him, while I went out to wait for my aunts to arrive and to call my brother, who lived in Vegas.

They moved him up into the ICU and he was in a coma. We didn't know what to expect and neither did the doctors.

Saturday night, things looked better. His organs weren't shutting down and they were hopeful that maybe in another 24 or 48 hours, they would know more. My brother got into town and spent some time with him.

So mom and I went home. That night, the hospital called and said that he had gone into cardiac arrest. They were able to revive him, but the doctor told her that every time that happens, the brain loses more and more oxygen and that it couldn't survive a few more episodes like that. He then asked my mom if she wanted them to revive him if he went into cardiac arrest again and she said no.

Well nothing more happened that evening. That night, it had actually snowed a lot and the roads were pretty awful Sunday morning. My mom spoke with the doctor and the doctor told her not to rush up to the hospital, because it was unlikely she'd be able to make it before he died. His vitals were not good and it was only a matter of time before we lost him.

But we had to get up there. So around 9:30 that morning, we drove up to the hospital and walked up to ICU.

When we entered his room, he was still alive and mom and me went over to him (my brother couldn't deal with it, so he was with his wife at a friend's) and my mom told him it was okay to go. That she would be all right and that she knew it was his time.

Maybe three minutes after that, the doctor came in and told us he was going and asked my mom if they should take him off the ventilator.

She agreed and he passed peacefully with my mom, her sister (who arrived just before he died) and me by his side.

Dad had just turned 58 years old the month before.

He was too damn young. But his body couldn't handle it anymore. He just let go.

This Memorial Day, we went to his grave site for the first time since his funeral. He's buried at Utah Veterans Memorial Park.

Dad might not have died in Vietnam - but I think we easily forget those who bring the war home with them. Vietnam killed my dad. It just took 40 years.

I miss him. We had our issues and we fought a lot - but I miss him.