Awoken-Creative Writing Piece

I abruptly awoke to the sound of my mother screaming. Her high pitch shriek pierced through the wall connecting my parents’ bedroom to mine and my instinct told me that something was amiss. I ran into my parents’ room to see my dad collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath, and my mother crying, “Morty, Morty, are you ok?” I could hear him trying to suck in air, but he couldn’t. He looked scared. I was scared. She yelled, “Call 911!” I reached for the phone and dialed, 9-1-1, and in panic, yelled back, ‘I can’t. You call.” She called. “We need an ambulance! My husband can’t breathe. He collapsed and can’t breathe. Come quick!”

We each took an arm and assisted my dad into a bent over standing position. My mom and I each gripped one of his arms and we slowly walked with him to the front porch where maybe, she thought, the fresh air would allow him to breathe. “You are going to be ok, dad,” I pleaded, while he continued to gasp for the fresh air that we thought would be so healing. His shoulders were caved in, his chest contracted and mouth wide open in a vain attempt to breathe normally. He was struggling for breath, struggling for life and crying because he was vulnerable and helpless.

I had never seen my dad in such a helpless state before and I was scared. My dad was the core of our family unit. So I was caught by surprise when the center of our family suddenly could not breathe. Instinctively, I assumed the position along with my mom of the caretaker, emergency medical team, and doctor while we were waiting for the ambulance to arrive but inside I was scared that my role model and father would not survive.

No ambulance came-just fire trucks and police cars. The firemen approached our front porch and asked, “Sir, what is wrong?” Couldn’t they see what was wrong? My dad could not talk, so my mom said in a rushed voice, “He woke up to go to the bathroom, crashed into the closet in our bedroom, fell to the floor, and started gasping for breath. He’s never done this before.” One fireman calmly said, “Ma’am, can I see a list of his medications and any medical history that your husband might have?” Another stated, “Sir, come with me and let me take your blood pressure and pulse.” I was so afraid. I wanted to be helpful, but I didn’t know what to do. The firemen proceeded like this for about 15 minutes until they hoisted my dad on a yellow stretcher and carted him into the newly arrived ambulance. “We will take him to the emergency room,” one said. “Dad I love you,” I cried. For the first time in my life, I really meant those three short words.

My parents had never discussed their medical problems with me before, so I was caught oblivious and thus scared for my dad’s life. I always thought that he was perfect and untouchable from anything harmful but this episode shattered that belief. Maybe my parents wanted to shield me from the vicious world of reality growing up and let me bask in the pleasures of imagination and endless childhood. They might have wanted to protect me from the ever present issue of disease and death, but at the time of the episode I was seventeen and was oblivious to the problems that caused my dad’s episodes.

By the time that he arrived at the hospital, my dad had regained his breath and to the onlooker, nothing appeared abnormal. As my dad was immediately given a hospital bed because he arrived by ambulance, we waited vigilantly beside his bed for a doctor to examine him. He was not an emergency case now, so we waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, at five o’clock in the morning, a doctor pushed the sterile white ER curtains aside and stepped into the room to begin her assessment. My dad retold the events as he remembered them, through the victim’s eyes and since he was a doctor, through a doctor’s eyes. She nodded a few times, asked a couple of questions, sent him for some tests and finally sent him home with an inconclusive diagnosis and a large hospital bill. To her, nothing appeared severely wrong; to me and my mom, her diagnosis was incorrect; she did not witness the frightening episode and I could not understand why she would send my dad home when he was obviously sick.

Two nights later, he fainted again, crashed into a different closet, and had an even more severe breathing episode. We called the ambulance for the second time and they rushed my dad to the hospital. He was examined by a different doctor this time, transported by hospital bed to have many different tests conducted, and once again they concluded that nothing appeared to be wrong. The scary thing was that these highly trained doctors, who spent eight or more years in medical school, could not diagnose their patient, my dad, and by doing so, they were inferring that he did not have a medical problem.

By the end of this two month medical fiasco, the doctors finally produced a diagnosis for my dad: vasovagal response which triggered coughing syncope-a nervous system reaction to coughing which caused him to faint. I could have diagnosed that. They spent a total of two months testing my dad to discover what he didn’t have and they finally diagnosed what my mom and I observed the first night of his episodes.

My dad’s coughing episodes woke me up to the scary reality of disease and aging. Much of medicine is unknown. Doctors and researchers are still trying to find cures for many diseases and even minor diagnoses are not certain. Therefore, the episodes that my dad was subjected to made me understand the role that medicine plays as well as the value of life and the reality of disease and death.