my daddy

In 1980, when I was in the 3rd grade, my father almost died.

Doctors didn't know what was wrong with him. He hurt. He ached. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. He was 40 years old and he spent his nights pacing the entire house and his days laying down, wondering if he was dying.

The CT scan was first used in the mid-1970s but it wasn't until right around 1980 that certain medical centers and research institutions had them. After having been diagnosed with what doctors believed to be some sort of vasculitis or blood vessel cancer, he had a CT scan taken and a grapefruit-sized tumor was discovered growing in his abdomen. He was rushed to Oregon Health Sciences University where his surgery was the first of its kind. The doctors went in believing the tumor was on his spleen but, upon removal of the spleen, they discovered that was not correct. They then had to re-evaluate, re-enter and remove half of his pancreas where the ice-blue tumor was found.

This returned my father to pretty much perfect health.

I was eight years old at the time, and remember vividly the emotions and the struggle to try to understand all that was happening, trying to be grown up and strong for my mother and my little sister who doesn't really remember anything of this time.

All was well for years.

I received The Phone Call while in Japan, in fall of 1995. Dad had a recurrance of the tumor, but this time in the liver. Things weren't looking good, but there was hope in a relatively new surgical procedure called cryosurgery. (Only) About 200 surgeries had been performed using this technique. The tumor would be frozen and killed, the body would flush out the toxins and the liver, being an organ that can regenerate itself, would do so in time.

Insurance would not cover this as it was deemed "too experimental", so my parents took the insurance company to court and won. After their trip to Japan and our family trip to China in 1997, they sent word that the surgery was scheduled for the end of May.

My father had type B blood. Positive or negative, I don't know. But it was B. He had to have a transfusion of blood platelets after the long surgery, which his body rejected. He went code blue three times.

During this day I was in Japan not able to sit still. I had a horrible headache, I didn't know what was happening, I hadn't heard from anyone. I even tried phoning my uncle in Sacramento for news, but to no avail. I knew something was wrong.

Doctors told my mother to pray, because my father was bleeding to death inside and there were no platelets in his blood to clot him. There was nothing they could do as his body was rejecting all their efforts.

So she did.

The next morning the bleeding had stopped and my father had regained partial consciousness. One doctor pulled my mother aside and said, "This is when I really do believe in the hand of God. We had nothing to do with this."

My father was baptised and confirmed into the Catholic Church the next Easter. I don't know what had happened to him, if he had visions, anything. I just know that he felt God had spoken to him and that he felt that he needed to make this step immediately.

At Thanksgiving of 1998, just engaged and having spent Thanksgiving with my soon-to-be sister-in-law's family in Colorado, I returned home to word that my father's tumor had returned, and that surgery was scheduled for right after Christmas. I arranged all plans to be able to be there for the duration, and my mother, my uncle and I stayed in that hospital all fourteen hours of that surgery...a surgery we were told would only take "max 4-6 hours."

He made it.

When I saw him after the surgery in ICU, yellowed with jaundice, the room around me began to spin, my chest felt heavily compressed, and I could not breathe; I about passed out. I had never expected such a strong reaction. My mother and my uncle couldn't even come into the room. I had to sit with my head between my legs, I held Dad's hand and just talked to him to let him know I was there as he came to excrutiatingly slowly. He gently squeezed my hand, which gave me the strength I needed to go on and to encourage my mother and my uncle to enter and talk to him, too.

I helped him walk up and down the corridors, as he knew to be up and walking immediately. He couldn't believe he was actually alive.

He walked me down the aisle in May of that year.

In June, immediately following my honeymoon, my parents informed us of a minor complication, something that could be taken care of in a simple outpatient procedure in their own hometown hospital. The scar tissue was blocking his bile duct and they had to go back in and unblock the duct.

However, the scar tissue had grown in like cement and the doctors couldn't get through. So he was sent back up to Portland, to the same doctor as before.

And had to undergo another fourteen-hour surgery, this time a bile duct bypass.

Upon learning of this I flew home immediately for a couple of weeks to help them get home and get my father back on his feet. He had a hole in his side where the bile would drain into a bag, that he had to empty. He had to duct tape this contraption onto his skin, and he said that the nurses refused to do it at his doctor's office. Probably because it was so gross. So that was my job after he showered, to help him re-attach his bag over his tube.

The day I left I accompanied him to his oncologist appointment. He had a temperature. I inquired to the doctor, doesn't that mean that there is infection? He just ignored me. Looked right through me as if I didn't exist and went on with his business.

I didn't want to leave, and I didn't feel right leaving.

That was the last time I would see my father alive.

There were various episodes following my departure during which my mother had to call family friends and 911 in the middle of the night. True nightmares to have to face alone...why is it the nights are always the worst?

He did have an infection. He had staph. But nobody treated him for staph. He was treated by one doctor for symptoms of medications that another doctor had prescribed him. It was as if the insurance company had said, "No more."

He developed blood clots and started to have strokes. He was then under the same doctor's care that his mother was under when she died...while having strokes in the hospital.

Difference was, she was a life-long smoker and had 15 years on him when she died.

Our last telephone conversation was one of great pain. I asked him why he wouldn't question what the doctors were saying or doing, because he always had said he would never allow himself to get caught in the whirlpool of medications that will drag you to your death, as it had his mother. He, rather angrily but in slurred stroke-affected speech, told me that they were all that were keeping him alive.

Christmas was coming, and we were planning to spend it together in New Orleans before flying up for the New Year to Oregon to be with my family. We had our first tree up, the lights twinkled, it was beautiful. Then, the night before I was to administer my final exam to my students, I had handed in all my master's work and officially completed my degree, my mother called. My dad had slipped into a coma. She was strangely calm. He had been lucid when they got in the elevator. When she realized she forgot her purse in his room, she left to get it and said they would meet up in x-ray or wherever it was they were taking him. She said she will never know what happened in that elevator because when she got upstairs, he was unconscious and nobody would answer her questions.

The doctor was calling her at home to pressure her to take him off the life support.

Neither my sister nor I were home yet. They hadn't even done a brain scan on him until an hour before I had flown in and arrived at the Christmasy-clad hospital the next day.

My mother, my sister and I were told by cold doctors, "Someone else could use those machines more now. They could be going to better use."

My sister verbally attacked him. I could have punched him.

We called our priest. We all stood around him and had a final Mass over him.

I still can't say the Our Father without crying.

We disconnected life support.

I held my daddy's hand and laid my head on his chest and cried and cried and cried and told my daddy how much I loved him. My mother and my sister held onto each other, they stood together at the foot of the bed. My daddy was my protector, he was my ally, he was my daddy.

I laid with my head on his chest and cried and listened to his heart beat slowly, slowly, slowly until it beat no more. Father had to pull me from his chest.

He was 59 years old.

December 17, 1999...but it sometimes still feels like yesterday.