December 3, 2025

During the hospital stay in August, my father shared his small room on the second floor with an eighty-one-year-old Chinese man with Alzheimer’s who insisted on being sent home. Both he and my father had mitts taped over their hands to keep them from tearing out their wires. This hospital stay was the only one where my father experienced some confusion about time. He told my mother that he needed to pick up the rationed eggs, it was urgent. My mother was alarmed for days. 糟糕了, she cried— Oh no. He’s talking about the past, she said. I don’t know anything about egg rations, she said, he’s never been confused in the hospital before. Her alarm became my alarm, and I agreed: he’d never been confused before. Nor, I added, ever this frustrated. Our presence usually made him smile, but on that first day of his stay in August, he was upset because we were unable to understand his requests. One of them was for the bedsheet to be shifted so that his hospital gown, which had ridden up around his waist, could straighten out. He knew what he wanted. We just could not translate his wants quickly enough. My mother had thought he was still talking about the eggs. I had thought he wanted another blanket. But had he spoken clearly? His speech had been slurred from the anesthesia, which the doctor admitted to giving him too much of. They overdosed him, my sister and I later joked to each other. And he had a tendency, even during his quirkiest moods, to bewilder us, especially my mother, with his non sequiturs. She has lived with this bewilderment their whole life together. She says it makes him the good guy and her the bad guy whenever she demands that he speak more plainly. During dinner at home with me, my mother ping-ponged between her bitterness at being given the role of bad guy and her anxiety about his new confusion. Where had the eggs come from? Did he think he was in the army and not in Flushing?

During this hospital stay, a nurse sat in the room with us for half an hour before another nurse took her place. They sat in a chair in the corner or by the entrance. Their job was to make sure the patients didn’t tear off their mitts. I believe that was their job, no one ever explained their presence. And it seemed they were only to sit there, and not allowed any other gesture of care, including touching the patients. They came in, relieving one another of a shift, took a seat, scrolled through a phone, scolded the patients for pulling at their mitts, for speaking when they should be resting. There was one moment when my father spoke very clearly: he wanted the bathroom to urinate. He insisted on getting up instead of using the plastic urinal. He tried pulling at the wires. He tried biting the Velcro off his mitts. He fumed. He sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He was so frustrated he was crying. My mother and I tried to help him stand. We were also trying to make him sit. It was too confusing for us to go with a single plan. Through all this, the stationed nurse watched us from her chair. She shook her head and muttered that he shouldn’t be standing. But he was about to stand. He had strength because he was desperate to use the bathroom to urinate, and my mother and I were trying to help him up and, at the same time, keep him sitting. He urinated on the bed and on the floor. The nurse sitting in the corner cried out. Another nurse rushed in. She and a different nurse cleaned up the mess.

For most of the next day, my father was asleep.
The doctors wondered if they had given him too much sedative.

When my father finally woke up the following afternoon, he was groggy but calm. He ate as he was supposed to, he made his requests politely, he slept without the need for mitts. In the bed next to him, the eighty-one-year-old man with Alzheimer’s continued trying to pull his off, and succeeded at least once. His wife and his son stopped by. In the hallway, I got to talking with the son. He was glad my father was improving and would be sent home soon.

Before I go on, I should say that until now, I had forgotten about this episode with the nurses. I say this with some amazement for two reasons. First, because I had gotten so upset at the nurse who had watched my mother and me struggle with my father, that I had burst into tears as his main nurse, who saw that I was about to cry, comforted me and promised to report the incident. I had felt like a child. And second, because most of the nurses during his stay in November were in fact kind to him, twice verifying to me and the doctors that he was lucid, perceptive, and had a sense of humor. This characterization was contrary to the doctors’ portrayal following the botched procedure (“Is your father always this confused when he’s at home too?”), which led me to that sort of quick and optimistic conclusion—this thing I needed to hold on to—that nurses were much smarter than doctors, because they were more involved with the patients and understood bedside manner. But later, one nurse took shortcuts with my father, causing his hands to go black and blue, and my theory about nurses—my hope—fell apart.