mahiwaga

found on ayşe’s tumblr

I randomly went home on Sunday. I woke up around 6 a.m. outside my own volition, without any alarms, and decided it would be a good idea to hop on a train and head up to L.A. I pretty much just ate something like six meals and watched cable TV with my dad. We watched a bunch of westerns.

But my mom casually mentions the fact that she notices that my dad seems to sleep a lot now during the day, and she wants to know if this is related to the fact that he has heart failure. Memories from intern year in the CCU flicker through my mind, and I think about all those poor souls with awful, awful cardiomyopathy, and dread sort of grips my chest. Like it or not, a lot of medicine is what we erroneously call gut instinct. More accurately, it is unconscious knowledge, the sort of pattern recognition capability the mind excels at, even when our consciousness fails to keep up.

My mom and I discuss the various things that have transpired over the past three months regarding my dad’s health. Apparently he really does have a left ventricular thrombus, but for some reason, his cardiologist is not treating him with low-molecular weight heparin. And the strangest thing is that my dad is not taking any sort of diuretic.

I am incredibly skeptical about the notion that he was never prescribed any Lasix. The idea that someone with an ejection fraction of 45% could escape the grasp of this drug seems absurd to me.

Then again, I know for a fact that my dad basically manages his own medications according to his own whims. He is, after all, a physician himself. So, for all I know, he probably takes Lasix whenever he feels like he’s getting bloated, or putting on weight too quickly, or whenever his legs swell up too much. He used to screw around with his long-acting nitrates and his anti-platelet medications, but stopped when he started getting chest pain too frequently for his own liking.

It is a known fact that physicians are the worst patients in the universe.

But watching my dad slumped over in the couch, snoring noisily at 1 p.m. worried me. The notion burrowed into my mind, and dug and dug, and it’s still digging, and I don’t want to take my thoughts to their logical conclusion.

Maybe it’s just his sleep apnea catching up to him, I tell my mom. And I know he stays up late watching TV. And in a short while, my dad wakes up, and he’s his normal self, quick-witted and temperamental as always. He takes me back to the train station, and I try not to think about the fact that none of us are getting any younger, and that damned stopwatch is always ticking, ticking, like an industrialized version of Poe’s tell-tale heart.

And I think about my silly desires. If I ever have kids, I want them to meet my dad. And that damned pendulum just keeps swinging and swinging, the grains of sand keep falling, and I’m not even sure I can get to that path from where I’m sitting, and maybe everything going through my brain is just futile.

I think to myself about the fact that there have only really been one or two things in my life that I’ve actually succeeded at, and I wonder if either I’m due for more, or if that’s really it, there ain’t no mo’, and it’s all down hill from here.

They say that you’re at your peak when you’re around 19. Physiologically, this makes sense. You’ll have just finished myelinating all your long tracts, and neural signals will be traveling the fastest that they ever will. Your lungs will have finally stopped developing, and your athletic ability will be at its optimal. Your long bones will have just fused and you’ll be as tall as you’ll ever be. I can still imagine what it must have felt like about a decade ago, when I thought I had everything I ever wanted.

But everything after that is a wearing and a grinding. The only thing that I’ve managed to improve, with a modicum of suffering, is the state of my brain, but at times like this, even that’s questionable. I have certainly not taken the best care of myself. But I figure I’ve got a ways to go. There are probably a lot more twists and turns to the future than even I can imagine.

And like always, all that I can really do is hope for the best, but expect the worst.

Just when you think all is lost, sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised. After struggling futilely to find some kind of jerry-rigged solution, sometimes all you have to do is turn the power off, and then turn it on again, and miraculously, everything else takes care of itself.

If only the rest of life worked out this way.

It’s déjà vu all over again.

I felt like reposting this scene from Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk:

God forbid I should try and look good for [her]. The worst strategy I could pursue is self-improvement. It would be a big mistake to dress up, make my best effort, comb my hair, maybe even borrow some swell clothes from the man I work for, something all-cotton and pastel shirtwise, brush my teeth, put on what they call deodorant and walk into the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum for my big second date still looking ugly, but showing signs I really tried to look good.

So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.

As if I don’t care what she thinks.

Looking good is not part of the big plan. My plan is to look like untapped potential. The look I’m going for is natural. Real. The look I’m after is, raw material. Not desperate and needy, but ripe with potential. Not hungry. Sure, I want to look like I’m worth the effort. Washed but not ironed. Clean but not polished. Confident but humble.

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.

Here’s passive aggression in action.