How Goes the Battle?

He almost always hallucinated when he was in the hospital. I’m not sure if it was due to DT’s or something else.  He was very good at appearing lucid, especially around nurses.  I would inevitably end up at the nurse’s station making sure they were aware that he was literally in his own little world.

My dad watched a lot of cartoons, or rather, he hallucinated that he was watching cartoons when he was really looking at a closet door or the wall.  He even asked me to help him find the remote so he could change the channel-I told him he had it in his hand already.  Then he held up his hand and pressed the imaginary channel button to change imaginary channels on the imaginary tv.

Whenever I brought Gatorade, he thought it was beer.  He opened the bottle like it was beer, drank it like it was beer and savored it like it was beer.  He drank them all that way.  He even made me watch for nurses so they wouldn’t confiscate his ‘beer’.

Another time at the VA hospital, he started motioning with his right hand, mumbling, then nodding his head.  He thought he was on a road and had encountered a couple of guys who could give him a lift in their truck.  My dad asked me if we could go with them but I told him to thank the men who stopped and to let them continue on their way because we already had a ride.

Yet another time, when he had several visitors in his room seated around both sides of his bed, he sat up, turned to me and said, “Clowns to the right of me, jokers to my left, here I am stuck in the middle with you”.

I corrected him on the lyrics and we all laughed.  That was one of his more lucid moments.  He was aware of the hallucinations and I think he fought them because one night when he seemed to have fallen all the way down the rabbit hole, he confided that he was having a hard time telling reality from reality.