Alex Leslie – Author

Hello Everyone! Long Time No See 🙂

You may have noticed that I have been oddly quiet for quite some time. No new releases. My social media activity has been sporadic at best. Basically I kind of disappeared without any explanation. Well here it is:

My life kind of imploded.

Let’s start at the beginning, around August 2022 when, despite years of carefully isolating my severely immunocompromised self from the rest of the world, I got infected with COVID-19. It was bad. I had to go on antiviral medication for weeks on end, which left me unable to taste anything but an ever-present metallic flavour that even mouthwash couldn’t get rid of. I thankfully was able to narrowly avoid hospitalisation, but even after I was cleared of viral infection, I was left weak, achy and basically feeling no better than when I was infected.

And I just kind of stayed that way.

Long COVID is no joke. It’s awful. It’s left me constantly exhausted, in pain and with several doctors dismissing me entirely, telling me I’m either depressed or exaggerating my symptoms. All while spending each day trying to decide if I have the energy to take a shower, or if a visit to the supermarket will aggravate my joint pain to the point where I’ll be bedridden for days after. I have good days and I have bad days, but for the most part, I have days were I’m left wondering if I’ll ever feel normal again.

But life wasn’t done screwing with me. Not by a long shot. Something far worse was on the horizon.

Fast forward to March 2023. On one of my rare trips out of the house to visit my elderly father, I showed up at his house to find Dad lying on the living room floor, semi-conscious, dehydrated and unable to move. He’d apparently been there for at least a day or so. I called for an ambulance and he was taken to hospital where he quickly slipped into a coma.

Dad had suffered at least two strokes. After the doctors conducted multiple scans of his brain, our family was told that he was not expected to survive. He was transferred to the charmingly named “end-of-life room” – basically a private room where Dad would be unplugged and left to die – and told the end was imminent.

Except he didn’t die.

Dad woke up three days later and complained that he was hungry. It seemed the doctor’s claims that the strokes had left Dad with “non-survivable brain injuries” were a little pessimistic. For the next six months, Dad stayed in hospital participating in post-stroke rehab in the hopes that he would eventually be able to return home. But as time passed by, it sadly became very clear that this was not going to happen.

The strokes had definitely had a profound and lasting effect on his mind. Dad no longer had much in the way of short term memory, so he was constantly forgetting pretty much anything he was told about anything. This led to him becoming paranoid about even the most innocuous of activities around him. Nurses were “stealing” from him or trying to “poison” him with medication he was certain he didn’t need. Dad was also having trouble separating his dreams from reality, resulting in bouts of confusion and delusional behaviour where he would became very upset when he was unable to understand what haw going on around him.

But worst of all were his personality changes. Dad had always been even tempered, logical and fiercely independent. Suddenly, he was dependent on other people to keep him safe and well – and it was making him angry and frustrated.

If this wasn’t enough, Dad’s physical condition was deteriorating as well. Rehab had gone a long way to helping him restore his motor skills to a degree, but he still needed a walker to get around, and was clearly struggling with moving even the shortest of distances. Ultimately, it was becoming obvious that Dad was no longer capable of looking after himself at home and that he would need to go into full-time care. It was heartbreaking.

While my sister took on the monumental task of organising my father’s finances and making the arrangements for him to go into care, I had the unenviable job of going to my family home, the house I grew up in, and start packing everything up. Going room to room and emptying the house of my father’s possessions was like slowly deconstructing his life and, by extension, my own as well. It took three months to get the house empty and ready to sell to cover the costs of Dad’s ongoing care. And by December 2023, our family home was gone. Christmas Day was spent visiting Dad at the care home. We brought presents, Christmas cards and food. He seemed to really enjoy it. For me, it was one of the most heartbreaking days of my life, as I had a really bad feeling deep inside that this would be our last Christmas together.

Come April 2024, I was sadly proven right. After a sudden and steep decline in his mental and physical health, Dad passed away peacefully in his sleep on April Fool’s Day. My sister and I have both since joked that he would have gotten a real kick out of that, given our family’s propensity for dark humour. Dad would have thought it absolutely hilarious that we would be stuck with the unenviable task of calling everyone to inform them of his passing, only to have them briefly wonder if this was some kind of sick practical joke.

It’s been almost two months since my Dad’s passing and it still doesn’t quite feel real. I regularly have to drive past both the care home and my former family home and it feels so weird that I will never step foot in either ever again. I frequently see news reports or online articles and think “I must tell Dad about that when I see him next” – only to remember that I won’t be seeing him.

But through my grief, I have found a strange clarity and focus I haven’t had for a long time. I found myself opening my laptop one day and reading through the multiple, unfinished writing projects I had been working on before I had fallen ill. And as I read, I started making little edits, adding words here and there. Before I knew it, I was writing again. A book that I had been trying to work on for over two years was finally coming together and, at time of writing this blog post, is about 90% complete. I still need to finish it, do some editing and polish it up – but it’s getting there.

So perhaps after a few years of horrible, soul crushing misery, there really is a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m might not be back to full capacity, but I’m on my way.

So that’s what’s been happening in my world. How have you been?

Lots of Love

Alex Leslie