My Father's Daughter

Posted 04/26/2007

Lara Devgan

"I have sugar poisoning," my father told me when he broke the news. It was a breezy summer night, and I was seven years old. I had never heard of type II diabetes. "I'm like the ancient mariner," he said. "Glucose, glucose everywhere..."

Eighteen years later, my favorite childhood memories with my father make me cringe -- ice cream on Fridays after school, sugared strawberries on Sunday mornings, Thanksgiving pecan pie. When I arrive back home in California for winter break, he is saddled with pill bottles, insulin syringes, and a zippered bypass scar down the center of his chest. My father, the respected ENT surgeon, can't save his own life.

It's not that my father doesn't make an effort. Indeed, there is a shelf in the refrigerator devoted to vegetables and a drawer in the kitchen filled with packets of Equal. But the running shoes I gave him for his birthday sit in a comer of his closet, barely used, and he still eats tiramisu for dessert. "Sugar tastes good," he tells me. The corners of his mouth turn upward in an easy, unplanned smile. And for a moment, his resistance to change seems decidedly life-affirming.

"I don't know what the future holds," he half-protests, half-admits, "but I know I like sugar in my coffee." We are sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Monica. Christmas music is playing in the background, and a line of fashionable people waits to buy Frappuccinos.

"I'll die of a heart attack," he says calmly. His emotions have been lost in the realm of clinical probability, abstracted into mechanical blips on computer screens. "I'm an old man," he says, sipping his coffee. "I've lived through World War II, Vietnam, Civil Rights. My father died; my children moved out... I lived through that, and I promise, I'll live through this." He waves around his double-cupped latte as if toasting a life of suffering.

I cup both hands around my tea, and my father slowly drinks his latte, which he has sweetened with saccharine to make me happy. He beams me an entry from the journal he keeps in his Palm Pilot: "I try to leave loved ones with loving words because I am afraid that every day will be the last. So much to do and so little time left. I still have not become the person I wanted to be."

***

It is not uncommon for good doctors to be bad patients. The medical center where my father works is populated by a smoking internist, a drinking cardiologist, and a surgeon who eats hot dogs for lunch. "Doctors are just people," says one of my father's colleagues, a young pediatrician who moonlights at the medical center. "You see in them what you see in everybody else -- smoking, overeating, drugs. Doctors not following their own advice are like cops not driving the limit." Doctors have an element of self-subordination fundamentally built into their personalities. "You put yourself last," she goes on. "You've got sickness and suffering all around you -- that's your first priority." My father nods. "Why do you think I stopped going to all those doctors?" he protests. "Half of them can't even take care of themselves."

My older sister has always taken a hard line about our father's diabetes. "It's about self-discipline," she says, with an edge in her voice. "When you realize that, you can stop banging your head against the wall." She is honest in a way that I have always wanted to be, and her frustration with our father, like mine, runs deep. Doctors have an invincibility complex, she tells me. "If he's going to be so cavalier, then what can I do?" she asks pointedly. She has her own life to live, her own job, her own struggles, far away from California. "After all, no one can save you but yourself."

But my mother knows that life is short. After growing old together for the past 38 years, both she and my father feel the anxiety of aging. "Sometimes doing what you like -- even if it's self-destructive -- makes you feel like you're young again," she says. "It helps you hang on to a past that's not there anymore." She looks around at the yellowed photographs that clutter her bedroom. She and my father have filled this house with so many dreams, and she is afraid that they will die when he does. "It's like the shadow under the candle," she sighs. "There is always darkness under light. Your father gives so much love and care to others, but that warmth comes at his own expense."

***

My father drives me to the airport at the end of my vacation. I am on my way back to medical school, to a journey that he once took, a future as uncertain as his. It is not yet 6 in the morning, and we watch the sun rise against the backdrop of downtown skyscrapers. I want him to know that everything I learn about comes back to him. Every molecule, every organ, every failing of the human body that I commit to memory over late nights at the library -- it all gestures back to him, his failing pancreas, his weak heart.

It is hard to sit next to him, a portrait of so much that I admire and detest, with such calm. Watching him fall apart makes me want to cry, scream, bang my head against the wall. I once read that love is just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes. He looks over at me, sadly, lovingly. His face is wrinkled with the lines of a million apologies and excuses. I have been straining to see into my father's soul all this while, and the only thing I know anymore is that I want to ride in this car with him forever. As we drive into the morning light, he tells me something he knows, something that can redeem him. "It's hard to be the person you want to be."

This essay won second prize in the 2005 Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Essay Contest and originally appeared in Academic Medicine. Lara Devgan was a fourth-year student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine when she wrote this.