On a Sunday morning in April 2010, I returned from a weekend trip to Tobago and headed straight to the St Augustine Private Hospital. My father had been hospitalised there and I was going to meet my sister for a conference with his doctor.
After being physically active for most of his adult life, my father, then just days away from his 77th birthday, had been enduring a series of health challenges for several years. Still, neither I nor my sister were prepared for the news we got that morning. Daddy was dying of end-stage renal disease (ESRD).
Dialysis was not an option. My father was already in poor health and putting him through the medical procedures necessary for a man of his age to get dialysis and prolong his life would do little more than prolong his dying.
The painful decision made that morning was to make arrangements for palliative care. We were given prescriptions to fill, sheets of instructions for daddy’s diet and end of life care and we took him home to die. Everything else about that day was mostly a blur for me. I remember struggling to keep my emotions in check, how long the drive along the Eastern Main Road into Port-of-Spain seemed and stopping at my workplace, rushing into my office, so I could finally give way to tears in private. Since it was Sunday, I had the privacy of an almost deserted newsroom at that time of the morning to vent my grief.
Processing that bad news, coming to terms with the fact that daddy had only a few months to live, was a struggle. Home care had to be arranged. Nurses were hired to attend to daddy during the day. Overnight care was handled by my mother, sister and adult son. As often as I could I would drop in on mornings on the way to work to help him with his breakfast and to administer the injections and cocktail of pills that were part of his daily regimen.
Watching a loved one die is difficult, to put it very mildly. But at least we had time. Time to say goodbye, to ensure all his final wishes were carried out.
My father developed ESRD because he had suffered with Type 2 diabetes most of his adult life. He had been an active man. He had been a physical education teacher at Mt Hope Junior Secondary and most evenings he could be found at the public courts in Port-of-Spain—now the location of NAPA—playing and coaching tennis.
Although he took care with his diet and exercise, the truth is that for many years my father lived with a progressive and untreatable disease which is one of the most common causes of ESRD.
On the night of January 28, 2011, my father, Fitzroy Thomas Sheppard, passed away peacefully after a seven month struggle with ESRD.
Long before I had that personal encounter with kidney disease, I signed up as an organ donor with the Ministry of Health’s National Organ Transplant Unit. It is my wish to donate my kidneys—and any other organs than can be transplanted, to save another’s life. Seeing the terrible toll that diseases like ESRD can take only strengthens my determination to share the gift of life whenever I get the chance.