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An internal medicine resident who looked to be about nineteen years old seemed to be the person who knew the most about what was going on.

He said the CT scan hadn’t shown anything unusual and that they were waiting for some preliminary blood test results.

He was cute in a Doogie Howser sort of way.

The only thing that assured me that he was, in fact, not a teenager was the bald spot on top of his head.

I was bored enough to google his name—Dr. Joshua Belton.

There was nothing interesting, not even a birth date to confirm his age.

I looked to see if he had a profile on Instagram.

He did not. Or if he did, it was under a secret name.

Millennials call these finsta accounts, short for “fake Instagram.” I tried to imagine his, tried to picture him making a sexy face next to the handle @drfeelgood.

This entertained me for about two minutes.

A nurse came by with a plastic container that she called a urinal and hooked it onto the side of my dad’s bed.

“When he wakes up, have him give a sample,” she said.

She didn’t give me any instructions beyond that, so when my dad woke up, I told him he had to pee into the container. It did seem designed for such a thing, had a long, curved neck on it. Still, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was meant to hold juice on camping trips.

I helped him sit up and scoot to the edge of the bed, his hospital gown opening in the back so I could see the crack of his butt.

I turned away because I knew he wouldn’t want me to see that.

But then, as if forgetting I was there at all, he took out his penis and placed it in the neck of the container right in front of me.

It was floppy and small, and I thought I was going to burst out crying.

I didn’t cry, though. Motherhood has made me quite adept at suppressing my own emotions to service the needs of others.

When he was done, I took the container from him and set it on the tray next to his bed. It sat there for a half hour before the nurse came to retrieve it. How much pee did this poor woman transport on a daily basis?

It was nearing three o’clock when Dr. Doogie Howser Joshua Belton returned to do a cognitive assessment.

“Okay, Rob,” he said to my dad. “I’m going to do some tests to see how your brain is doing.”

“All right,” Dad said, sounding up for the challenge.

“First, I want you to name as many words as you can that start with the letter F .”

“That’s easy,” Dad said, sitting up straight and confident. “ Fart . Fuck ... Can I say fuck ?”

Dr. Belton and I laughed.

“That’s my dad for you,” I said.

“Any others?” Dr. Belton asked him.

“ Farm ,” he said. Then he stopped. I guessed he forgot what he was supposed to be doing and was too confused to ask.

When Dr. Belton was sure they’d reached the end of that exercise, he moved on:

“Okay, now I’m going to give you five words to remember, and then I’ll ask you to say them back to me in a few minutes. Here they are: elephant , flower , red , door , pencil . Got it?”

My dad laughed a little, which is what we do in my family when we’re uncomfortable. I was fairly certain he had already forgotten the words.

“Do you know what hospital you’re at?”

Dad looked at me, as if hoping I would give him a hint or whisper the answer to him, as if we were two kids in chemistry class.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Do you know what county?”

He thought hard about this. It pained me how hard he thought.

“Daly County,” he said finally. Which is not a county. Daly City , where he lives, is in San Mateo County. But we were at UCSF in San Francisco (which, incidentally, is both a city and a county).

Dr. Belton looked at me with his baby face, and I shrugged. Up until this point, my dad hadn’t said much, had been pleasant and easygoing and not obviously demented. I could tell that Dr. Belton was just then realizing how serious things were.

“We’re actually at the UCSF hospital, in San Francisco,” he said to my dad.

“We are?” my dad asked.

Dr. Belton nodded and moved along. “Do you know what month it is?”

My dad looked up at the ceiling. “September?”

“Close,” Dr. Belton said, with a good-natured smile. “It’s March.”

My dad snapped his fingers, like Almost had it .

“Who do you live with, Rob?” Dr. Belton asked.

“My wife, Meredith, and my dog,” he said.

Dr. Belton looked at me to validate this, and I said, “Dad, you don’t have a dog.”

Their last dog was Ruby, and she had died at least ten years earlier.

“Of course I have a dog!”

“Dad, Ruby died a long time ago.”

“Go get Mer. She’ll tell you. Where is she?”

“She’s at home, Dad.”

“No, she was just here!”

This was the first time I had seen him become agitated. I reached for his hand, held it in mine. He calmed.

Dr. Belton asked him to count backward from one hundred by sevens.

He did okay at first, though it took him longer than it should have to come up with the right answers—ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine.

When he got to the sixties, he seemed to completely forget what he was doing.

He threw up his hands with a laugh. I’d never seen him so embarrassed.

Dr. Belton showed him an illustration of a clock and asked him to recreate a drawing of it.

My dad drew the circle, but got tripped up when attempting to draw the hands of the clock at six and two.

He had the concentrated look of someone presented with quantum physics.

Then that went away, and he just appeared utterly lost. The same happened when Dr. Belton showed him a drawing of a cube and asked him to recreate it.

After a few minutes of trying, there were just disconnected lines on the paper.

“Okay, Rob,” Dr. Belton said. “Now, do you remember those five words I gave you a few minutes ago?”

I could tell by the look on my dad’s face that he didn’t even remember that Dr. Belton had given him five words. He scrambled, spitting out random words in a hurry:

“ Paper ? Bird ? Plane ?” he tried.

Dr. Belton shook his head.

Elephant, flower, red, door, pencil, I thought to myself. I had to confirm my own sanity.

“So?” I asked, as Dr. Belton made notes.

He looked up at me.

“We’re going to admit him.”

“They’re admitting me?” Dad asked.

Dr. Belton and I both ignored him.

“What do you think is going on?” I asked.

Dr. Belton sighed. “It could be any number of things, from a nutritional deficiency to an autoimmune issue to ... We just don’t know yet.”

Then he left, saying someone would be back soon to bring us upstairs.

“Okay, Dad, we’re going to figure this out.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I’ve been here all day.”

I squeezed in next to him in bed, snuggled into his side, feeling like a little kid again.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been here all day too.”

He shifted in bed to look at me and said, “You have?”

Once they admitted him, I assumed he’d have his own room, but he didn’t. There was a curtain divider, with an older man on the other side who had a Filipino translator and, from what I could gather, a problem with his liver.

I texted Merry, told her they were getting my dad settled.

Merry: They must have some idea what’s wrong with him.

They don’t.

My phone buzzed with an incoming call—Merry.

“Let me talk with the doctors,” she said.

“They’re not here. They have other patients. They do rounds.”

“Well, how long are we supposed to accept their inconclusiveness?”

“As long as we need to. They have to do their thing. We are not doctors.”

“Should I come there?”

“I’ll stay until he gets some dinner. It’s probably best if you rest tonight and start fresh tomorrow. He’s tired anyway.”

“Is that Mer?” my dad asked from his bed.

I nodded. “You want to talk to her?”

He extended his arms out for the phone, and I gave it to him.

They talked about practicalities, which is what they’ve always excelled at.

There was discussion of Merry bringing him his pajama pants and some tortilla chips.

He also told her to make sure Medicare was “springing for all this.” When he gave the phone back to me, Merry was no longer on the line, which was just as well.

I sat at his bedside, waiting for them to bring his dinner.

He fell asleep. A notification from Facebook popped up on my phone, a message from Prisha, my high school friend who had told me to bring my dad to the ER.

Actually, calling her a friend might be going a bit far.

We were acquaintances. Her parents did not condone her having friends because she was always supposed to be studying (which I guess paid off, considering she is now a doctor).

Hey. Just wanted to see how things were going with your dad ... and how you’re holding up. I get off my shift at 6 if you want to get food or a drink or something. I’m sure you’ve had a long day.

I debated responding and telling her that she was the only person in my life to check in on me. But I decided that sounded rather pitiful and instead wrote:

I definitely need a drink. Tell me where to meet you

She suggested a bar in Union Square, a few miles from the hospital, and I told her I’d be there. Then I texted Kyle because even though I was irritated with him, I missed the girls, and he was my only direct line to them.

How are things there?

He responded almost immediately.

Fine. How are things there?

I was already exhausted by this text exchange. Kyle has never been good with texting, and I have never been good at accepting this.

Ok. My dad was admitted to the hospital. They don’t seem to know what’s going on. We’ll see what all the testing turns up. What did you guys do today?

He responded with one word:

Park.

I could have turned this into a fight by making a snarky comment like Thank you for the detailed account. But instead, I didn’t respond at all, which I knew wouldn’t have any kind of effect on him but still felt satisfying.