Bruce Lee delivers a roundhouse kick to the side of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s head when Dad walks into the living room and Mom immediately senses something’s up. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
He dry swallows and says he almost passed out at the grocery store. Standing in line at the deli counter, he suddenly broke into a cold sweat but felt so hot, he ducked out of line and stood in front of the beer cooler until he calmed down. “I had a pain this morning,” he points to his right ear, “But now it’s down here,” he places his palm over the left side of his chest, like pledging the flag.
“Breathe in deep,” Mom says.
He does.
“Still?”
“Yeah.”
“We gotta go to the urgent care.” Mom says this as she clips on her wrist watch, the last step in the ritual that is her getting set to go work at the Neurology Department of Miami Children’s Hospital. It doesn’t matter she’s a nurse and has seen something like this or worse practically every day of her working life, the ease with which she addresses and observes him irks me. She should be more worried.
Dad shakes his head and raises the palm from his chest and into the air. “No, you go to work, I’ll be fine. It’s probably just gas or some weird movement I might have made.”
“You look pale,” she says, then turns to me, “Junior, doesn’t he look pale?”
He did. Dad rarely gets sick but when he does the first thing to go before his temperature rockets is the color from his face. “You do.”
“Junior, can you take me?”
Dad’s always been resilient and quiet, almost emotionless. I’ve only seen him cry a couple of times in thirty years: the day after my older sister announced she was eloping with the boyfriend we all disapproved of, and when my aunt, his oldest sister Carmen, passed away. Aside from that, the man had the emotional range of a Cyberdyne Systems T-101. So, when he gives in so easily to a hospital visit, I know he’s definitely not well.
In the car, he breathes in and presses the area around his heart with his fingers. “What if I’m having a heart attack?”
Taking my cue from his Latino maleness, I immediately get defensive when an uncomfortable subject comes up. “Why would you say that?”
“Because, Junior, this has never happened to me before. Chest pains?”
There’s silence as I refuse to engage this conversation and mentally try to find a way out.
“If it was my heart, I think I’d be dead by now,” he says.
“We’re gonna get to the hospital and you’re going to see everything’s fine.” It’s bullshit; I’m worried as hell because he’s speaking so cryptically that my mind can’t help but offshoot to the worst possible scenario it can conjure.
I park outside the Baptist Health Urgent Care in Doral as palm trees sway in the breeze and I wish we were walking toward the sandy grounds of anywhere in Miami Beach. Meanwhile, Dad works on spraying a bit of Binaca in his mouth and sprucing his hair with the cheap plastic comb he carries in his pocket, for moments like this where he might have do a quick once over of his appearance. I fill out the forms for him, afraid any kind of mental exertion might trigger something worse, but he eventually gets impatient with the ping pong of questions and finishes them himself. Not many people are ailing this weekend so within twenty minutes, the blood pressure cuff compresses his arm and sends back a normal reading, but the attending nurse does say his EKG reads abnormal. “We’re going to give you five children’s chewable aspirin and nitroglycerin. I want you to wait a few minutes and tell me if your chest starts to feel better.”
Nitroglycerin and aspirin, I knew it was his heart. Dad reaches sixty in less than a year and he’s chewing children’s aspirin? It can’t be his heart. After a few minutes, the nurse comes back and asks if it’s better. He relaxes his posture some and says, “Yes, it’s much better.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much would you say the pain was when you came in?”
“Seven.”
“And what would you put it at now?”
His tilts his palm like a scale, “I’d say a three.”
“Three? Okay,” she takes the chart and walks off, pulling the curtain shut behind her.
Dad’s got wires hooked up to his chest, stomach, and feet, all routing to a machine that beeps: a metronome helping me keep time between now and whenever the bad news I’m anticipating is verbalized. The curtains are a bright blue with what look like some type of cute elephant or lion dancing around; is this really what’s supposed to take my mind off the fact . . . The doctor swings the curtain open like Zorro, smiles, (practiced, I suspected), and tells my Dad they have to transfer him to Baptist Emergency in an ambulance. He says urgent care facilities don’t have the equipment to properly monitor whether or not he is indeed having or has had a heart attack. So, to err on the side of caution, he’s sending him to Baptist for a chest X-ray and enzyme test.
“You think it’s his heart?” I’ve imagined myself saying this before—in relation to either parent—but fuck me if it doesn’t come easier than two plus two.
He curls his mouth. “Well, I mean if he says the pill relieved the pain and his EKG readings, I definitely want to send him to the hospital, just to make sure everything is okay. We’ll have an ambulance on the way, they’ll take you straight to emergency where they can take a better look. Please sign these forms consenting it’s okay.”
“Please make sure they go easy on me,” Dad tells the doctor in his broken English. Now, keep in mind, all the conversations I’ve had with my parents in this story and throughout most of life have been in Spanish, Dad’s preferred language. He can handle himself very well with English and uses it consistently at work, but if given the choice, it’s Spanish. So when he appeals for sympathy, to the obviously American doctor, in English, it’s because he’s extremely worried. That’s his go-to: verbalizing his anxiety. I inherited Mom’s method: going white as a sheet and saying nothing, prepping as to what the afterlife will be like.
The doctor laughs and says, “Everything’s going to be fine.”
You better not be lying, white coat, I think.
“Call your Mom and tell her, but not that she has to come here; I don’t want her missing work for this. You take your car, go home, get my phone charger, and meet me at the hospital.”
“I’m not leaving you alone.” I see the nurse, “Excuse me, can I ride with my Dad?”
“Of course,” she replies.
"Llevate el carro¸” Dad says, matter-of-factly.
“If you want to take your car, you can’t follow the ambulance,” The nurse says.
“No?” I ask. A pointless question, knowing I’m going to have to go home anyway.
“I mean, you can follow the ambulance but you won’t be able to run the lights with it or anything.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“Ve a la casa y llevame el cargador,” he says.
I call Mom from the car and tell her what’s going on. She says to come to the house and we’ll ride to the hospital together. She got the night off but tells me not to let Dad know. He calls a minute later, and tells me not to forget the charger. I tell him I’ve yet to get home but that I’ll be at the hospital as soon as possible. The ride’s a blur; I just want to get to him. He’s alone, without any of us, what if something happens? I’m almost thirty one and have experienced plenty rites of passage, but one; the one I never want to pass.
When I get home, Mom’s taking off her watch, dressed much more casually, clipping hoops to her ears. “Let’s go. He says to take the charger.”
“He called?”
She nods her head. “Told me not to take the night off, so let’s go.”
On the way to Baptist, I relay in better detail everything the doctor said.
“I knew something was wrong with him when he came home so flushed and for him to just leave the store like that, without getting what he went for? He must be scared,” Mom says.
“Actually, he looks better.”
She eyes the speedometer, “Go a little faster.” Mom’s never encouraged me to go faster, but rather constantly nags about slowing down and not tailing the car in front. “Nos estamos poniendo viejo,” she says.
“Lo se.” Fucking hell if I don’t know we’re all getting older.
At the hospital, we walk right in and through triage. Almost every patient checked in has a silver head of hair resting atop their heads, but in Room 51, Dad’s is salt and pepper, fluffy and curled back, the result of years of careful blow drying and combing after every shower. The nurse sticks EKG sensors to his feet when he catches sight of Mom, smiles wide, and asks why I made her miss work. I ask about the ride over.
“Oh, man, they made a big deal over nothing. They turned the siren on.”
“How do you feel?” Mom says with a smile.
“Better, but it still hurts when I breathe.” He points at me with his eyes, “You bring the charger?”
I dig into my side pocket. “Yes, Jesus why is it so important?”
“Plug it in,” he says, pointing to the wall, “In case your sister calls.”
“She already called me,” Mom says, “She’s on her way.”
“No, the kids have school tomorrow, she doesn’t have to come all the way out here,” smiling the whole time.
“How do you feel?” I ask again, noticing the renewed color to his face.
“Maybe I just need to release one big fart,” he says.
Later, the nurse comes back in and says they’re giving him an enzyme test, which through blood work helps determine if he’s had a heart attack. He’s watching the news, surprised at the crazy rain lashing South Beach.
“That’s where I want to be,” the nurse sighs.
“Only sunnier,” I say.
“Not even.”
She gets a laugh from us as she fills the fourth tube full of blood.
Dad smiles while telling us how the ambulance made racket all across the Palmetto and how he’d never managed to get inside an emergency room so quick. When the nurse comes back in with the enzyme strips to run the test, he announces he’s hungry.
“Hector,” Mom protests.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
“Well, we can’t give you anything until after the tests but I’ll be sure to let the assistants know so you maybe get it sooner.” When the nurse leaves, he leans over and repeats the fart joke. I laugh, not caring he’s rehashing old material.
My sister arrives and kisses us all. My seventeen-year-old niece/goddaughter hugs Dad a bit more melodramatically than necessary and I remember the high school ego I must face the following morning, convincing myself this merits missing a day of work but Dad will be pissed if he finds out I called out over this.
He’s always made a big deal about first impressions, appearance being everything. So when I was a kid it was all about wearing ironed button down shirts tucked into starched pants and shiny shoes. That way, when people met me they saw a decent young man, rather than a vagrant. With this, came Dad’s attempt to push gold on me. He’s always got his thin gold necklace on, from which dangles a simple gold crucifix and lucky gold money bag with $100 etched into the back. I constantly tease him that it looks like a boxing glove. My teenage years gave way to rebellion against Dad’s ethos of appearance; we clashed many times when I went to church in baggy corduroys and short sleeve, plaid button downs, tucked out. Eventually, he accepted the fact I inherited Mom’s taste in dress: first thing ironed is first thing slapped on. I’ve never liked gold, not because of Dad, it just never struck me as something aesthetically appealing to wear. None of this matters when Dad tells me to unclip his necklace, and wear it until he gets out of radiography. “Para que no se pierda.”
I forget to remind him about it when the doctor comes in and tells him he’s good to go. That what he has is acute pericarditis; a virus has caused the tissue around his heart to swell, creating discomfort and episodes of fatigue. The bottle of antibiotics and bed rest for the next three days should do it. I also don’t mention it when he smiles at me, says that if I’m going to McDonald’s to please get him a Filet O’ Fish because he’s starved. The necklace goes unnoticed until three days later when I get home from work and he’s on the couch engrossed in hour three of an A-Team marathon.
“How do you feel?” I ask, kissing his forehead.
“Much better,” he says, feeling around his neck. “Hey, do you have my necklace?”
“Yeah,” I unclip it from my neck.
He puts it on and sets the charms at the middle of his chest.
I walk to my room and reach for my own necklace: the silver one I wore constantly up until three nights ago; it holds La Virgen de Guadalupe and a lucky dolphin.
Part of me wishes Dad hadn’t remembered the necklace, but is thankful he did, because the day will come when I’ll wear it again—permanently. The other part of me— the guy sporting a rumpled, plaid, short-sleeved shirt over baggy corduroy pants—hopes that day never comes.
He dry swallows and says he almost passed out at the grocery store. Standing in line at the deli counter, he suddenly broke into a cold sweat but felt so hot, he ducked out of line and stood in front of the beer cooler until he calmed down. “I had a pain this morning,” he points to his right ear, “But now it’s down here,” he places his palm over the left side of his chest, like pledging the flag.
“Breathe in deep,” Mom says.
He does.
“Still?”
“Yeah.”
“We gotta go to the urgent care.” Mom says this as she clips on her wrist watch, the last step in the ritual that is her getting set to go work at the Neurology Department of Miami Children’s Hospital. It doesn’t matter she’s a nurse and has seen something like this or worse practically every day of her working life, the ease with which she addresses and observes him irks me. She should be more worried.
Dad shakes his head and raises the palm from his chest and into the air. “No, you go to work, I’ll be fine. It’s probably just gas or some weird movement I might have made.”
“You look pale,” she says, then turns to me, “Junior, doesn’t he look pale?”
He did. Dad rarely gets sick but when he does the first thing to go before his temperature rockets is the color from his face. “You do.”
“Junior, can you take me?”
Dad’s always been resilient and quiet, almost emotionless. I’ve only seen him cry a couple of times in thirty years: the day after my older sister announced she was eloping with the boyfriend we all disapproved of, and when my aunt, his oldest sister Carmen, passed away. Aside from that, the man had the emotional range of a Cyberdyne Systems T-101. So, when he gives in so easily to a hospital visit, I know he’s definitely not well.
In the car, he breathes in and presses the area around his heart with his fingers. “What if I’m having a heart attack?”
Taking my cue from his Latino maleness, I immediately get defensive when an uncomfortable subject comes up. “Why would you say that?”
“Because, Junior, this has never happened to me before. Chest pains?”
There’s silence as I refuse to engage this conversation and mentally try to find a way out.
“If it was my heart, I think I’d be dead by now,” he says.
“We’re gonna get to the hospital and you’re going to see everything’s fine.” It’s bullshit; I’m worried as hell because he’s speaking so cryptically that my mind can’t help but offshoot to the worst possible scenario it can conjure.
I park outside the Baptist Health Urgent Care in Doral as palm trees sway in the breeze and I wish we were walking toward the sandy grounds of anywhere in Miami Beach. Meanwhile, Dad works on spraying a bit of Binaca in his mouth and sprucing his hair with the cheap plastic comb he carries in his pocket, for moments like this where he might have do a quick once over of his appearance. I fill out the forms for him, afraid any kind of mental exertion might trigger something worse, but he eventually gets impatient with the ping pong of questions and finishes them himself. Not many people are ailing this weekend so within twenty minutes, the blood pressure cuff compresses his arm and sends back a normal reading, but the attending nurse does say his EKG reads abnormal. “We’re going to give you five children’s chewable aspirin and nitroglycerin. I want you to wait a few minutes and tell me if your chest starts to feel better.”
Nitroglycerin and aspirin, I knew it was his heart. Dad reaches sixty in less than a year and he’s chewing children’s aspirin? It can’t be his heart. After a few minutes, the nurse comes back and asks if it’s better. He relaxes his posture some and says, “Yes, it’s much better.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much would you say the pain was when you came in?”
“Seven.”
“And what would you put it at now?”
His tilts his palm like a scale, “I’d say a three.”
“Three? Okay,” she takes the chart and walks off, pulling the curtain shut behind her.
Dad’s got wires hooked up to his chest, stomach, and feet, all routing to a machine that beeps: a metronome helping me keep time between now and whenever the bad news I’m anticipating is verbalized. The curtains are a bright blue with what look like some type of cute elephant or lion dancing around; is this really what’s supposed to take my mind off the fact . . . The doctor swings the curtain open like Zorro, smiles, (practiced, I suspected), and tells my Dad they have to transfer him to Baptist Emergency in an ambulance. He says urgent care facilities don’t have the equipment to properly monitor whether or not he is indeed having or has had a heart attack. So, to err on the side of caution, he’s sending him to Baptist for a chest X-ray and enzyme test.
“You think it’s his heart?” I’ve imagined myself saying this before—in relation to either parent—but fuck me if it doesn’t come easier than two plus two.
He curls his mouth. “Well, I mean if he says the pill relieved the pain and his EKG readings, I definitely want to send him to the hospital, just to make sure everything is okay. We’ll have an ambulance on the way, they’ll take you straight to emergency where they can take a better look. Please sign these forms consenting it’s okay.”
“Please make sure they go easy on me,” Dad tells the doctor in his broken English. Now, keep in mind, all the conversations I’ve had with my parents in this story and throughout most of life have been in Spanish, Dad’s preferred language. He can handle himself very well with English and uses it consistently at work, but if given the choice, it’s Spanish. So when he appeals for sympathy, to the obviously American doctor, in English, it’s because he’s extremely worried. That’s his go-to: verbalizing his anxiety. I inherited Mom’s method: going white as a sheet and saying nothing, prepping as to what the afterlife will be like.
The doctor laughs and says, “Everything’s going to be fine.”
You better not be lying, white coat, I think.
“Call your Mom and tell her, but not that she has to come here; I don’t want her missing work for this. You take your car, go home, get my phone charger, and meet me at the hospital.”
“I’m not leaving you alone.” I see the nurse, “Excuse me, can I ride with my Dad?”
“Of course,” she replies.
"Llevate el carro¸” Dad says, matter-of-factly.
“If you want to take your car, you can’t follow the ambulance,” The nurse says.
“No?” I ask. A pointless question, knowing I’m going to have to go home anyway.
“I mean, you can follow the ambulance but you won’t be able to run the lights with it or anything.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“Ve a la casa y llevame el cargador,” he says.
I call Mom from the car and tell her what’s going on. She says to come to the house and we’ll ride to the hospital together. She got the night off but tells me not to let Dad know. He calls a minute later, and tells me not to forget the charger. I tell him I’ve yet to get home but that I’ll be at the hospital as soon as possible. The ride’s a blur; I just want to get to him. He’s alone, without any of us, what if something happens? I’m almost thirty one and have experienced plenty rites of passage, but one; the one I never want to pass.
When I get home, Mom’s taking off her watch, dressed much more casually, clipping hoops to her ears. “Let’s go. He says to take the charger.”
“He called?”
She nods her head. “Told me not to take the night off, so let’s go.”
On the way to Baptist, I relay in better detail everything the doctor said.
“I knew something was wrong with him when he came home so flushed and for him to just leave the store like that, without getting what he went for? He must be scared,” Mom says.
“Actually, he looks better.”
She eyes the speedometer, “Go a little faster.” Mom’s never encouraged me to go faster, but rather constantly nags about slowing down and not tailing the car in front. “Nos estamos poniendo viejo,” she says.
“Lo se.” Fucking hell if I don’t know we’re all getting older.
At the hospital, we walk right in and through triage. Almost every patient checked in has a silver head of hair resting atop their heads, but in Room 51, Dad’s is salt and pepper, fluffy and curled back, the result of years of careful blow drying and combing after every shower. The nurse sticks EKG sensors to his feet when he catches sight of Mom, smiles wide, and asks why I made her miss work. I ask about the ride over.
“Oh, man, they made a big deal over nothing. They turned the siren on.”
“How do you feel?” Mom says with a smile.
“Better, but it still hurts when I breathe.” He points at me with his eyes, “You bring the charger?”
I dig into my side pocket. “Yes, Jesus why is it so important?”
“Plug it in,” he says, pointing to the wall, “In case your sister calls.”
“She already called me,” Mom says, “She’s on her way.”
“No, the kids have school tomorrow, she doesn’t have to come all the way out here,” smiling the whole time.
“How do you feel?” I ask again, noticing the renewed color to his face.
“Maybe I just need to release one big fart,” he says.
Later, the nurse comes back in and says they’re giving him an enzyme test, which through blood work helps determine if he’s had a heart attack. He’s watching the news, surprised at the crazy rain lashing South Beach.
“That’s where I want to be,” the nurse sighs.
“Only sunnier,” I say.
“Not even.”
She gets a laugh from us as she fills the fourth tube full of blood.
Dad smiles while telling us how the ambulance made racket all across the Palmetto and how he’d never managed to get inside an emergency room so quick. When the nurse comes back in with the enzyme strips to run the test, he announces he’s hungry.
“Hector,” Mom protests.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
“Well, we can’t give you anything until after the tests but I’ll be sure to let the assistants know so you maybe get it sooner.” When the nurse leaves, he leans over and repeats the fart joke. I laugh, not caring he’s rehashing old material.
My sister arrives and kisses us all. My seventeen-year-old niece/goddaughter hugs Dad a bit more melodramatically than necessary and I remember the high school ego I must face the following morning, convincing myself this merits missing a day of work but Dad will be pissed if he finds out I called out over this.
He’s always made a big deal about first impressions, appearance being everything. So when I was a kid it was all about wearing ironed button down shirts tucked into starched pants and shiny shoes. That way, when people met me they saw a decent young man, rather than a vagrant. With this, came Dad’s attempt to push gold on me. He’s always got his thin gold necklace on, from which dangles a simple gold crucifix and lucky gold money bag with $100 etched into the back. I constantly tease him that it looks like a boxing glove. My teenage years gave way to rebellion against Dad’s ethos of appearance; we clashed many times when I went to church in baggy corduroys and short sleeve, plaid button downs, tucked out. Eventually, he accepted the fact I inherited Mom’s taste in dress: first thing ironed is first thing slapped on. I’ve never liked gold, not because of Dad, it just never struck me as something aesthetically appealing to wear. None of this matters when Dad tells me to unclip his necklace, and wear it until he gets out of radiography. “Para que no se pierda.”
I forget to remind him about it when the doctor comes in and tells him he’s good to go. That what he has is acute pericarditis; a virus has caused the tissue around his heart to swell, creating discomfort and episodes of fatigue. The bottle of antibiotics and bed rest for the next three days should do it. I also don’t mention it when he smiles at me, says that if I’m going to McDonald’s to please get him a Filet O’ Fish because he’s starved. The necklace goes unnoticed until three days later when I get home from work and he’s on the couch engrossed in hour three of an A-Team marathon.
“How do you feel?” I ask, kissing his forehead.
“Much better,” he says, feeling around his neck. “Hey, do you have my necklace?”
“Yeah,” I unclip it from my neck.
He puts it on and sets the charms at the middle of his chest.
I walk to my room and reach for my own necklace: the silver one I wore constantly up until three nights ago; it holds La Virgen de Guadalupe and a lucky dolphin.
Part of me wishes Dad hadn’t remembered the necklace, but is thankful he did, because the day will come when I’ll wear it again—permanently. The other part of me— the guy sporting a rumpled, plaid, short-sleeved shirt over baggy corduroy pants—hopes that day never comes.
