Personal Post

It's a very strange thing, seeing my father get more and more frail. The man came down with fewer than three colds in the entire time I was growing up; he never got sick, or at least never admitted it if he did. He was one of the healthiest people I knew, which made it a problem as he fell further and further into dementia. We knew that while his brain was unhealthy, in body he was like an Olympic athlete, and he could live forever. But over the last year or two, I've been taking him to the doctor more and more, usually for some sort of infection that started off small.

I got a call yesterday from a visiting nurse service asking for permission to go visit him to treat a boil on his leg; something his caregiver had told me about and for which Dad had taken a course of antibiotics. Apparently, the boil hasn't healed completely and the doctor wanted a nurse to assess it. I suppose a boil isn't that serious, but the fact that my father is growing more and more frail, falling victim to one infection after another, makes me thoughtful. At times over the last seven years, it seemed like he would live forever, but now I'm wondering sadly if his time is a lot shorter than I thought.