The Daily Kvetch

I have been calling my dad many times a day, but not getting any answer. I haven't heard from the doctor, just from that nurse yesterday who wanted to send him home to a nursing home temporarily, but then called to say the doctor changed her mind and was testing him further. None of this made me very comfortable, so I took mom to visit him today.
It was a hot hot day, drying out my already cracked skin, and making it crawl just a little. I had dressed my mom in her new clothes, a beautiful pastel short sleeved sweater in blues, aquas, and white, with small beads, and a pair of nubbly blue pants. She looked great, and didn't fight me when I suggested the clothes she had been wearing were all wrong for the warm weather. When we got there, we found dad had a room in the new tower at the hospital. It was a little cubicle of a room, but private, a big improvement over the emergency room where he had been left for nearly two days.
He was asleep when we arrived, and we couldn't wake him. He was breathing, but I got scared and ran to the nurse's desk. It took a little while to raise some attention, though someone finally came. I told them he wasn't usually this way, and that I wanted to speak to his doctor. The nurse managed to rouse him, but he was hardly himself. His eyes were glazed and vacant, and he looked at me and saw someone else. He asked, "Are you here to give me my medicine?" and opened his mouth like a baby bird. Then he fell back to sleep.
My mother was losing patience with the whole affair. She was strangely disengaged, like a squirmy five year old who doesn't understand what is going on. She wanted to go home almost as soon as she got there.
I never did get to speak to the attending physician, but another doctor, who had never seen him before, came and talked to me briefly and got dad out of bed. Shockingly, she told me that they had been thinking about releasing him today, in this state. They had taken him off the IV medications, and put him on oral medication. She wondered whether by limiting his fluids (in this weather!) they had made him dehydrated and that explained his hallucinations and sleepiness, but didn't want to call in a neurologist or any other specialist to investigate further. She thought he might be sent home tomorrow, when I will not be around to take him home since I'll be in class from 8:30-1:00 (possibly longer since students will probably want to discuss their sample writing with me) and then from 7-10 PM. I am very disturbed. Though I know we are all mortal and that there is little we can do about it ultimately, I find the hospital's treatment of my father this time cold. If they think there's nothing they can do, they ought to just tell me to put him in hospice. To treat him half-heartedly is really unacceptable, or at least I find it so.