*If you enjoy my writing, please share/recommend/go paid. Also check out my other two stacks, Sincere American Writing and The Black Snake of Wounded Vanity. Very different material from this stack :)
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A few days ago I visited my parents at their small house with gorgeous views up on the Riviera in Santa Barbara. Dad had not been doing well for a few weeks—gurgling and coughing; vomiting; sleeping on and off all day. It’s from the chemo and the radiation. Mostly the oral chemo, which he takes for five days straight and then has three weeks off. The symptoms of the chemo lag and take a while so they started coming just after he began his radiation, a new regimen to tackle his lung tumor, via 15 sessions in 15 days. Dad has been looking old, hunched, thinner, pale-faced, exhausted.
Since he can still only partially swallow—formerly he couldn’t swallow at all for nine months due to his Myasthenia Gravis which he got from the immunotherapy—he’s been using a peg tube inserted into his stomach to eat. Mom pours liquid protein shakes into the machine’s bag and presses a button and the brown liquid pushes through the tube and into his gut. This way he gets all the calories he needs each day. In addition she gives him injections of water to keep him hydrated. He can eat and drink physically, by mouth, but only slowly, piecemeal.
Anyway a few days back I visited them. For a couple days Dad had been improving. After a really bad night, my mom had taken him to the ER, worried due to his incessant, ruthless coughing and his pale cheeks. He was admitted and they gave him water injections. He was badly dehydrated. Better by the time I saw him, he looked more human—redness on his cheeks, more energy, even a half grin. We chatted for a while, the three of us in the living room. I occasionally glanced out their floor-to-ceiling windows to the sparkling city below, Highway 101, cars swishing, and the glimmering blue sea, Santa Cruz Island out there, glorious. The sun shone down like a glittery yellow diamond. We discussed Dad’s condition, my continuing move-in with my girlfriend in Lompoc, my Substack writing, politics, Wokeism, etc. The usual.
They told me about the audiobook they were slowly listening to together. That reminded me of listening to the 37-hour Thomas Mann epic The Magic Mountain with them last year. A special experience. My father—a man of rationality and science, not of literature—had surprisingly loved it.
Around 4:30pm I left. I got a quarter mile away when my mom called. Never a good sign. I picked up. My mom’s frantic, worried voice boomed out from my 2018 Nissan Leaf’s speaker system, loudly.
“Right after you left Dad’s peg tube came out,” she said.
I heard the anxiety in her frenzied voice.
Feeling both concerned and annoyed, I said, “I’ll come back.”