I’ve been depressed since yesterday, when I innocently brought my parents dinner (before work, I stopped by in the morning) and found my father hunched over breakfast in terrible pain. Lower right quadrant of the belly, a 9 out of 10. For an old stoic like my dad, that’s bad.

So I cancel out a couple of patients and take him with my mother to the ER and wait for an evaluation. Can’t wait all day, so I leave my mom with her phone. Gotta’ go. Let me know what happens.

It’s a terrible feeling, leaving your 84 year old mother in an ER with your sick 89 year old father. Like you want to say, Be good.

Anyway, today FD and I visit him, he’s in the hospital dialysis center and tubes of streaming blood are everywhere.

I’m kind of squeamish.

But Dad is happy to see us, startled out of sleep. We only stay a few minutes then both of us have to be off to work. FD drops me off at my office and I’m thinking, I’ll walk home. It’s an hour walk, but it will do me good.

We’re quiet in the car, but we pass a bar, a neighborhood bar. I know a lot of people see this place as a home away from home. There’s a marquis, a big white sign outside that announces Jan’s Birthday!, or Billy’s 300 bowling score.

Today’s announcement: We Fix Broken Hearts.

We fix broken hearts, I read to FD. That’s what they do over there at the bar. Valentine’s Day is bringing out the best in advertising. He starts to sing the BeeGees song, How can you mend a broken heart? How can a loser ever win?

Such a chutzpah (such gall) I say, to encourage people to mend a broken heart with boozy company, to drown sorrows. Join the club. Misery loves company.

I can’t blame the barkeepers for trying to attract customers. A person has to make a living. You just wonder, you know, how that must feel, enabling alcoholism. Therapists like me, who are forever telling people, DON’T go to the bar, just DON’T, aren’t much competition for friends at the ol’ watering hole.

Lately I’ve been telling people with drinking problems to stay home if they’re not going to go to a meeting. Read recovery blogs like this one, or therapy blogs (even mine). But not the bar, you’ll never mend a broken heart over there.

Of course, if the economy gets any worse, the bar will have to close up shop. If they do, maybe the marquis will say, Stay Home, Read Blogs– That’s What We’re Doing.

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