It was August 1993, 2 months after my 15th birthday, and I was showing at the C-Fair Charity Horse Show. C-Fair was a 4-day event that ran from Thursday through Sunday in early August at the Monroe Fairgrounds. I was showing my Morgan mare, Amigo Alexis. It had been a long day and I was just finishing up my last class of the evening. My mom and I volunteered at the show as the award coordinators. This meant that we spent the months leading up to the event ordering ribbons, trophies and gifts for the show, and during the show we organized the distribution of these awards at the end of each class. It was a big job, and as I left the arena that evening, my mom was off somewhere on the show grounds tending to those duties.
My dad had worked that day at the landscaping nursery that he managed but said he was going to be able to make it in time to watch my last class. I hadn’t seen him in the audience, but that wasn’t unusual as the show was busy and I was concentrating on my horse and performance. As I came out of the ring and was riding back to the barn to untack, I saw him walking. He appeared to be limping a bit, which was not super surprising since his back had been bothering him recently. He was walking toward the show arena. The sun was beginning to set as I approached him. I smiled and asked if he had seen my class. “Yes, class number 85. I’m headed to watch it now. Good luck!” “No, it was number 83. I just finished it. Are you okay, does your back hurt?” He said his back did not hurt but his speech was a little funny and I noticed that the limp looked more like a lurch or a stagger, and he was sort of dragging part of his body along. He almost seemed drunk, but my father didn’t drink so I knew that wasn’t it. “I can’t find my car,” he told me while leaning on my horse to stabilize himself. “What? Where did you park it?” He was clearly confused at this point and just kept repeating that he didn’t know where he had parked his car along with something about a chicken. I was really worried now, and I gently reassured him that we would find his car and asked him to follow me to the parking lot.
By the time we made it to the lot a few hundred yards away, he was leaning on my horse so heavily that I was having trouble keeping her steady. Alexis was more levelheaded than my other horses, but horses are trained to move away from pressure. I had to work very hard at willing her to stand still while he rested his weight on her so he didn’t topple over due to her stepping away from him. She kept taking tiny steps in the opposite direction and I had to compensate by asking her to take tiny steps back toward him; she was confused and he was confused and quite frankly I was confused as well. My father clearly wasn’t going to be any help in finding his car, which seemed like a useless task at this point because it was increasingly apparent that he was having some sort of medical emergency. But he was becoming distraught and was insistent that we locate his vehicle. I quickly picked a nearby car and told him with authority to lean against it and not to move while I rode around to look for his car. He obliged. I rode around that entire parking lot searching, but to no avail. I went back to where he was leaning on the hood of the car and told him to stay put while I went and found mom to help.
I trotted my horse back toward the barn and found one of my friends on the way, I hopped off my horse and asked her to do me a huge favor and put her up for me. I offered no explanation as I hurried off to the show arena to find my mother. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I was growing frantic as some time had passed since I had left my father leaning on that car in the now-dark parking lot. Finally, I spotted another friend from my stable way up at the top of the bleachers in the far corner of the building. She was sitting and laughing with some of her friends who weren’t from the horse world, friends who had come to watch her ride. She was giggling and flirting with a boy who lived next door to her that I knew she had a crush on. I stopped at the bottom of the bleachers and called up to her, asking if she had seen my mom. She called back down that she had not. I asked her to come down and help me find my mother. She told me that she was busy and reminded me that she didn’t know where my mother was. I repeated that I needed her to come down and help me find my mother, and this time my voice cracked and tears started to stream down my cheeks. This prompted her to put her social session on hold and come down. “What’s wrong?” she asked me with concern. I pretty much fell apart and blubbered out some explanation about my dad being sick and unable to find his car and needing to get back to him but also needing my mom to come help. She told me to go ahead and go back to my dad and she would find my mother and tell her where I was.
I went back to where I had left my dad finding, to my relief, that he was still leaned up against the car. He was now talking to some lady I didn’t recognize who was about my mother’s age. The lady had apparently come across him and realized that he needed some help. She told me that he was looking for his car, which of course I already knew. I explained that it wasn’t in the lot. She said that he kept saying something about a chicken and that she believed that there was a lot on the other side of the fairgrounds with sections labeled with farm animals. As we were talking, my mother walked up and, after briefly filling her in, she and I set off to see if my father had parked his car in some far away lot amongst some chickens. Sure enough, there in the deserted parking lot sat my father’s old green Buick, under a metal sign with a rooster on it to help you remember where you parked.
My dad insisted that he was okay to drive his car home and, even though that wasn’t true, my mother agreed to it. She told him to follow directly behind us for the drive. He drove 15 miles an hour the entire way home. Monroe to Everett isn’t normally a particularly long drive, but it was on that day. We did eventually make it home. After parking his car in its usual spot, he leaned into the back seat to retrieve something and wasn’t able to get himself back out. Try as we may, my mother and I were not able to unstick him from his prone position. Unsure how to proceed we decided to ask a neighbor for help. The son of one of the neighbors, a large young man in his late teens, ended up coming over and lifting my father out of the car and setting him properly on the seat. He also made us call 911. An ambulance came and the paramedics checked my father out and agreed that he should go to the hospital. But he refused, and they deemed him competent to do so and said that their hands were tied. They told us to call them back if he lost consciousness and they would be able to take him in. After they left, we were somehow able to get my dad into the house and onto his bed.
Over the next couple days, my father laid on his bed, semi-coherent, still refusing to seek medical attention. Each evening when we would come home, I was scared we would find him dead, so my mother would go in his room first to check for life prior to my entering. Then one of the days, she came back outside and told me she needed my help. My father had gotten himself stuck again. When I entered the room, I saw a sheetless bed with a cardboard tube that cheese puffs had come in sitting atop a piece of newspaper directly in the middle of the mattress, it was filled with urine.
My father was wedged sideways in the small space between the bed and the far wall that was left so that the baseboard heater did not catch fire to the bed. To make matters worse, he was unclothed, he had part of his leg on top of the mattress and had managed to get his hand under the mattress with his fingers tangled around the springs. He really was stuck. It was not easy, but we were able to eventually dislodge him and get him dressed. We then had to begin the process of getting him out of the house so the paramedics could be called. He was conscious but just barely, he had very little strength or control over his body. He was basically dead weight. My father was a little over 6 feet tall and had worked labor jobs for years, so he was a solid man. My mother was 5’2” on a good day and I was all of 100 lbs soaking wet, but we managed. Being the stronger of the two, I got the job of bearing most of my father’s weight in a very inefficient sort of piggyback ride, with him bearing a small amount of his own weight by keeping his feet on the ground. My mother stayed behind us and helped him pick his feet up one at a time and place it a couple inches forward. It was a small house, but under these circumstances it was a long way to the front door. When we finally got him outside, we called the paramedics and they were able to take him to the hospital this time, he was not coherent enough to object.
At the hospital, scans revealed a large tumor in my dad’s brain. Days later, surgeons removed what turned out to be an aggressive cancerous mass. My father was given 6 months to live.
Patchwork Girl 