“Stay,” he mouths again.
Damn it. I don’t have a choice, do I?
I hold his hand and stay.
“Are you the next of kin?”A doctor walks out to the waiting room where I’ve been sitting for the past hour. I thought about driving home, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk away not knowing if he was going to make it.
Truth is, I don’t know anything about the man, including what’s going on with his health. For all I know, he could die tomorrow, and I wouldn’t know why.
“I guess I am.” A loaded answer, but the only one I can give.
“He’s stable,” the doctor says, landing like a stone dropped into deep water—relief first, then the slow-spreading dread underneath it. A trickling effect I wasn’t expecting.
I stand too fast. “What…what happened? He was coughing blood. He could barely breathe.”
The doctor face softens. “I know. We were able to get his breathing under control. The bleeding has stopped for now.”
“For now?” I echo.
The doctor folds his hands in front of him, like they show in movies. Just like the one who came to tell me my mom didn’t make it five years ago. This is about to get sticky.
“How much do you know about your father’s history?”
None, I want to answer. “Not much. We’re not close.”
He points to the chairs where I was sitting as he guides us over. “Your father is in acute renal failure, which you may already know.” I don’t, but I can’t make my mouth say the wordno. “His kidneys aren’t working well enough to filter waste or excess fluid from his blood. That’s why he’s been on dialysis.”
“Dialysis,” I repeat, searching for answers nobody’s giving me. “He said he was dying.”
“Well, yes and no.” He lets out a breath. “Dialysis does the job the kidneys normally do, practically filtering or cleaning, if you will, the blood. But when someone misses treatments, or their kidneys get worse faster than expected, toxins and fluid build up.” The doctor pauses, searching my face. “That buildup can cause shortness of breath, confusion, and sometimes, fluid can back up into the lungs. That’s part of what happened today.”
“So he was drowning,” I say before I can stop myself. “Inside his own body.” Go fucking figure. The body he drowned in the bottle is drowning him from within.
“In a sense, yes,” the doctor answers softly, like he wishes he could say something kinder or have better news. “He also had a small amount of bleeding from his airway, likely from the coughing and irritation. So nothing major, but we need to keep an eye on it.”
“He looked…terrified. Has this happened before?”
The doctor’s voice gentles even more. “Episodes like this can be very frightening. When the body can’t clear waste, it affects the brain too. He probably felt like he was losing control. And although this particularly hasn’t happened before, he has had other emergencies because he misses treatment.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. Some patients need more support than others to make it.”
I rub my hands over my face. “So what now? Is he…is he dying?”
There’s a pause.
“He’s not dying tonight,” the doctor says carefully. “But kidney failure is serious. Dialysis keeps him alive, but it can’t fix the kidneys. He’ll need consistent treatments and close monitoring. And he can’t miss treatments; we need to find a way to keep him motivated and attend the days he’s supposed to, or he will die.”
“Would he need a transplant?”
“He’s on the list, but that can take a long time. They can get a living donor, but those usually come from friends and family.”
I scoff, because he doesn’t have either.
“In the meantime, he needs to get his treatments, and he needs to rest.”
“Can I see him?”
