cw: death
dad died this summer, from his first heart attack, barely a week after his 57th birthday.
i get the first call at 11:30pm from mom, who lived in toronto with him and my brother. she says to not worry, but dad's in the hospital, and i should plan to visit first thing tomorrow morning.
she calls again, 15 minutes later, and says that i should try to head back that night.
she calls a final time at midnight, asking me where i was. i just got in the cab, i say. i think you might be too late, she says vaguely. but you should still try to make it back. i tell the driver to please speed a bit on the highway if he's comfortable doing so, and he does, and im grateful.
i get to the hospital at 1:30 am. the nurse gives me a long, hard stare after i tell them who i'm here to see. she asks if my mom told me the news, and that's the moment when i know for sure (except it still doesn't quite feel real). i lie and say yes, and she stares at me a little longer, scrutinizing. then she leads me to the room with my dad's body and the rest of my family. when i press one last kiss to his forehead, he is still not quite cool.
i learn the story afterwards. dad went upstairs for a lie-down after dinner, but was awoken by severe chest pain. he vomits, which is a thing he never does, and asks mom to call 911 immediately. she does and provides all the symptoms, the dispatcher tells her that they've sent for an ambulance, and they should get ready to go.
so they get ready, and then they wait. they wait for 15 long minutes, my dad in an extreme amount of pain, and nothing happens.
mom calls 911 again and asks if they have an ETA. the dispatcher responds that don't have visibility on that. she asks if she should just drive my dad to the hospital and is advised that the best thing to do is to keep waiting.
so they wait another 15 long minutes, and still no one shows up. the house is in a car-oriented suburb, 5 minutes away from a major highway, a ten minute drive from the hospital.
mom decides that they should not keep waiting. she and my brother help dad into the car, and they drive him to the hospital.
(my brother drives us back the next day to collect his things. at one intersection, he says, "he told me to be careful when doing the left turn. those were his last words to me." they were, in all likelihood, his very last words.)
they arrive at the emergency room entrance. dad gets out of the car, takes two steps, lurches forwards, and dies on the front steps of the hospital.
every time i think about this sequence of events, i feel a sense of vertigo. i don't understand it, except i understand the workings of moloch all too well. i don't understand why this was allowed, but of course this is a thing that happens every day. i don't understand why the dispatcher didn't say to my mom, "if you have a car, use that, it's faster", but i can feel the weight of all the incentives behind it.
i don't understand why the common narrative that i was told, that we were all told growing up, is that one should wait for an ambulance, when this is the way it ends, except i know that institutions do not see themselves clearly and they often do not know what they do. i don't understand why afterwards, everyone we explained this to nodded at us sagely and said "oh, of course, we all know that ambulances are slow and terrible and actually the transport of last resort, it's understandable but a shame that you didn't get this update". except of course i understand that too.
now i have updated. and now it is too late.
my dad is dead, because his family members were too naive to know that the thing they were instructed to do by the state was a false thing.
i don't know if you should update on this, if you don't live in toronto, or if things are only this bad because of the chronic emt shortage and it will get better in some indeterminate amount of time, or if we just caught them on a bad night, or what.
all i know is that my family waited 30 minutes for an ambulance that didn't come, and now my dad is dead.