My friend Dan said that to me when I remarked over the phone that my dad was still in the hospital, over three weeks now.

“You gotta get him out of there,” said Dan. “A hospital is no place for a sick person.”

I laughed because HOW TRUE.

I told my dad and he concurred.

I know more about staying in a hospital than I ever did before. I know about surgeries and antibiotics and deadly staph infections. I know about catheters and the options for having a bowel movement when you can’t get out of bed. I know about roommates that cough and wake you up in the middle of the night. I know about not taking a shower for almost a month because you can’t get your wound wet. I know about pain that makes you scream and muscle spasms that make you cry and the relief that comes with a shot of drugs.

I know about these things.

But I have not directly experienced them.

I’ve only observed, watched my father go through all of it, constantly taking a few steps forward only to fall back and fall down over and over again.

“It’s always something,” my dad likes to say, mostly exhausted, barely amused. And he’s right.

They’ve tried to take the catheter out twice now. Both times, his muscles have seized and forgotten how to urinate on their own. The first time, he was so backed up he was practically crying for a catheter and when they put it back in, he filled up six one-liter bottles with urine over a forty minute period.

The second time they took it out, he seemed to be doing okay. It hurt. But it was working. And after a day or so, he thought he might have conquered ye old PEE ON MY OWN thing, finally.

And then he developed a raging UTI that moved from his urinary tract to his prostate. The catheter was put back in and the urine bag filled with blood. They put him on antibiotics and it took three days for the pain to subside.

It’s always something.

After the cement block surgery, they put a wound vac on his….wound. It essentially looks like someone vacuum sealed some plastic on his body. A tube flows from the wound into a container hooked on the side of the bed. It’s draining the infection, filling with blood and a lovely assortment of other fluids. Every three days, they have to change the dressing and the pain gets less and less as the wound is healing.

My father said the first time they changed the wound vac after surgery was the worst pain he has ever felt. It was more extreme than the initial hip break, worse than waking up after surgery and not having morphine. The reason it hurt so much more than subsequent changes was because after his operation, the surgeon packed his OPEN WOUND with gauze. The first change of the wound vac involved an hour of plucking gauze out of my dad’s raw skin, ripping off flesh along with it.

My brother and my mother were with him that night. My brother sitting across from the wound, watching the doctor work. My mother on the other side of my dad, holding his hand as he squeezed and yelled and sobbed. My brother doesn’t cry but when talking about that hour, he gets choked up a little. His voice steadies.

“Yeah,” he says, looking away. “It was really bad.”

And then…

“I wanted to take that surgeon and punch him over and over again. I wanted to take the person responsible and throw them up against the wall.”

All of us have hit that point. When the anger surges. When we remember that six weeks after routine hip replacement surgery, my father was walking and driving and laughing. There’s a picture of him on the digital camera, standing upright in the kitchen on Easter Sunday, goofing off, looking happy.

I try not to sit in the anger too long. And honestly, it only comes up when I see my father in pain. My knee-jerk reaction is to hurt the person who did this to him. But I know and we all know that we may never find out where the staph infection came from. Surgical error. An unsterile titanium hip. We’re not really sure. And at this point, it doesn’t really matter. I read that even if you go into the cleanest hospital in all of Clean Land, for any type of routine surgery, you still have a 3-5% chance of developing a staph infection.

That’s the kind of crap just floating around hospitals.

Which is why a hospital is no place for a sick person.

And my dad, who is getting surprisingly better recently despite still having both the catheter and the wound vac and a PICC line in his heart, who is only taking Motrin and Tylenol for his pain, is setting his sights on coming home.

A hospital bed is being delivered to my parents’ house and he will sleep in the living room as stairs are not an option for him. He will have nurses coming to the house and physical therapists too. He probably still won’t be able to shower.

But he’ll be home.

And out of there.

And I am counting down the days.