The Grandad Saga of Last Night · 11:14am Aug 9th, 2022

Oh my goodness. Sweet Celestia, that amount of unnecessary drama was somehow worse than those occasions when someone posts a "Save G4" thread in The Shameless Self-Promotion Bureau... But at least I can put my own and everyone else's worries at ease for now.

So what exactly happened, you may ask?

A recount of what I explained in the previous blog: Last night my family were all just doing their own thing, when my mum realised she had a voicemail from my grandad, saying that he was "still at the hospital" but that he didn't think he'd be there for long, or something along those lines. None of us actually knew that he was at the hospital, or which hospital he was at, and his mobile was turned off as it always is. Cue the alarm bells.

Now, I'm not sure exactly what happened next, except that there was a lot of panicking and ringing around and that at some point my aunt who lives in New Zealand was called to see if she knew anything. Thankfully, she had been able to get in contact with Grandad and knew which hospital he was at, but none of the hospital staff were saying what had happened to him or why he was there in the first place. My parents realised that probably the only way of getting to the bottom of things was driving over there to see him. That's when I wrote the blog post last night.

Eventually, my parents got to the right hospital. He was in A&E. According to them, the waiting room in A&E was packed, there were 17 ambulances outside at one point all with patients inside waiting to be triaged, and there was only 1 doctor there. My mum found out that my grandad had been having chest pain for two weeks, not said anything (notice the recurring theme here?) and decided eventually to call his GP. The GP was apparently too busy and told my grandad to drive himself into A&E in case there was a serious heart problem going on. What Grandad hadn't realised was that the waiting times can sometimes be several hours depending on if they're short-staffed or if there are any other problems going on. He also didn't realise that they had the air conditioning up really high, and even though he was visibly shaking from the cold he outright refused to ask for a blanket because he "didn't want to cause any trouble." My mum managed to find him a blanket, and she said that after 40 minutes he stopped shaking.

He was tested for heart failure and heart attack but the tests all showed that he was ok. Nothing came up on the blood tests, his blood pressure was fine, he was ok. The problem was that by the time he was discharged it was gone 2am, so my parents have had barely any sleep and have spent the entirety of last night worrying over what turned out to be nothing major. He's been told not to drive anymore with these chest pains he's having, but apparently while my parents were driving him home at gone two o'clock in the morning he was already asking my mum if she wanted him to take her out shopping on Wednesday.

I... Good grief. I love my grandad, but his refusal to ask for help and his stubbornness are his major downfalls every single time...

I keep on thinking it's a Saturday because everyone's so exhausted, what with having a good week's worth of drama in one night. I think I need another cup of coffee.