[Dottore]

Patrick:I am sorry to hear about your grief.

But bureaucracies are bureaucracies.

If you like black humor here's my story.

My father was given a week to live, and so placed in a nice private room in the Palliative Care ward of the hospital.

When he was still alive after 7 days, a social worker from the Palliative Care Unit—a completely arrogant, insensitive young beotch from Bombay—started sneaking into my fathers room and telling him he would be moved to a Hospice because his time in Palliative Care "was up".

This upset my father greatly. He just wanted to be left alone to die. Not moved around town. And it also supremely pissed me off, and I tore a strip off the social worker for speaking to my father without me present-given his complete incapacity.

She then got the hospital bureaucracy fired up. It seems, Palliative Care is only for people who require medical "care" in order to die. Not people who no longer require "care" in order to die.

This is of course a fine Hobbesian distinction that I spent many hours debating with the social worker and hospital staff. She, for reasons best known to her, had made it her mission to get my father out of the hospital—even though there were two empty rooms on the PC ward. I swear I came extremely close to throwing this person out of the 10th floor window at one point.

As it turned out my father lived another week, and stayed in the Palliative Care room. His last week was completely marred by the social worker repeatedly telling him he was going to be moved, and by bureaucrats debating whether he continued to be eligible for palliative care. Often these debates took place in front of him. This was really regrettable, and in retrospect I should have thrown that beotch out of the window when I had the chance.