For your own safety, do not destroy Vital Testing Apparatus

My dad, as regular readers likely remember, is a quadriplegic wheelchair user (partial use of arms, C5/6 injury) dating from a car accident 22 years ago when I was home from college.

Because of all the complications inherent in spinal cord injuries, there are a lot of minor scares and hospitalizations, and these have readjusted my anxiety meter over time so that a sudden ambulance ride to the ER is no longer guaranteed to be alarming, or a memorable milestone; especially here, so far away (my parents live with my sister in Louisiana, so the time difference is 8 hours). Oftentimes I never hear the exact details except that it wasn't too serious until he's back home the next day.

But on the 7th he had a minor inpatient operation to remove a small tumor, but then two days later was sent back in an ambulance after a cardiac event that required three defibrillations. There was evidently a hematoma after the surgery that led to internal bleeding that dropped his blood pressure too low (BP is one of those spinal patient issues). Now he's been there all weekend and seems to be feeling better, but apparently they are still investigating some mysterious (?) symptoms (as always, the degree of mystery that actually exists vs. what doctors have remembered to explain to mom and she has remembered to tell us is uncertain). He isn't being kept cold to control his blood pressure anymore and they moved him out of intensive care, anyway.

This uncertainty is a little tough to deal with, even though as a baseline I'm very inured to periods of elevated worry about his health. I guess it's partly that there's not enough information to judge exactly how worried I should be. But I haven't been this worried about him for a few years at least.

I know teenagers in reality are often foolish and prone to risky behavior and refusing to pay attention to guidance or instructions, but having always been extraordinarily cautious and timid, it's a quality I can't relate to and have difficulty even empathizing with.

Even a character who, like The Abbot's Roland Graeme, is 100% plausibly foolish, impulsive, violent, arrogant and daredevil — being 17 and spoiled by a horribly abusive combination of parental indulgence and neglect — is very difficult for me to read.

My patience with foolhardy risk-taking in narrative is very short before I start saying constantly, "This guy should have Darwin Awarded himself to death by now. Please let this one kill him. And on the plus side, if he died this time, I wouldn't have to read about any more of his infuriating decisions."

So the bad parenting retiring from the foreground has not made the book much more palatable so far.