Paradise Lost

---

I actually found out that Dad had been admitted to hospital on the day after I arrived in Bali. I almost packed my bags immediately and headed back to Australia but held on a while in the hope that it would be just a short acute episode.

Well it wasn't ..... and Dad was in ICU care for 14 days. During this time he was mostly consciously intubated, and communicated in writing. I may as well have been on a different planet, but after a week of ICU I was getting quite familiar with my new environs. In fact air travel is a bit like ICU as it too is a totally controlled artificial environment that humans depend on to sustain life. People in ICU also get jetlagged because in ICU there is no day or night. In ICU it's all systems go, monitoring your every bodily change and those of the other dozen or so, critically ill people around you.

It's not just the fun things that are life affirming but also those close calls where life seems to be barely within our grasp and yet we are there grasping it with all our strength. Dad's OK now and is out of ICU and it's amazing how brief that window is between being OK to being critically ill or from being totally dependent on machines to take each breath to being able to sustain one's own life again. Breathing - it works!

Like to dedicate this song to Dad and the rest of us who