the suffering of my father
... illness did not come in the way of headaches or feverish flu. It started out with a series of throat clearings and involved into great giant heaving of air and body shaking coughs. At the age of fifty-five, he had been diagnose with asthma and emphysema. My father would wake up every night trying to hold his breath. Sometimes he would run outside and grab hold of a tree or a metal stick and squeeze it very hard until he was able to breathe. Also, he couldn’t sleep without the light off in his bedroom, so my mother would have to keep the light on every night input of his asthma. But every time he started to do something like take a walk around the house or carry something heavy, he would be out of breath and his coughing would develop. It was painful to witness my father in such a distress. I felt powerless and unhelpful. Each time he does that I would get the inhaler and put on his mouth, started to pump air into his throat. Sometime he got better after using the inhaler, but sometime nothing happen. Once, I remember it was four o’clock in the morning when everybody was mainly asleep my father would stay awake, my sister Pang, and I were asleep in one room and my brothers Chang, Ha, and Yu were asleep in the room across from us. Suddenly, I heard a loud noisy knock on my door. I went up to open the door, and my mother she look straight at me with watering eyes, she said “Ker if you don’t call 911 right now your father is going to leave us forever.” I was frozen in space for quite a long time and confused at that time when I heard these words from my mother. I frantically woke my brothers up and ran down the hall to check on my father. I grabbed my father, looked helplessly as his face was getting paler and his lip bluer, shaking as the leaves in the wind. At that moment I just wished I could do something to help my father regain conscious, but there was nothing I could do. I am not a doctor nor am I God. My mother put her mouth onto my father’s mouth and blew, and my older brother Yu try to push his chest to see if he was still breathing. My other brother was on the phone and told us that the ambulance was on the way. At the community hospital I grabbed hold of my mother’s arm and told her not to worry while we were sitting in the waiting room anxiously waiting to hear from the doctor. I told my mother not to cry, we had done our best in which we can. Now we could only pray, and let doctors do their job. Upon reaching the hospital my brothers were anxious to know about the welfare of our father, but my mother and I did not have any information but hopes. A hour later a nurse came to us and said “Your father is doing better now.” My mother unconvinced of the news ran into the room to look at my father as I stood beside her. Unable to constrain my emotions any longer, I went to my father and hugged him with tears dropping on his shoulder, saying to myself “Why God had not been fair to an innocent man like my father, who been trying so hard to do better each day in life?” After that night, it had frighten me, thinking of what’s going to happen if we did lose our father. Whenever my father had an asthma attack it reminded me of the past. My father was an American soldier who fought in the Secret War in Vietnam. In combat, he was exposed to many poisonous gas and black smog during his voyage through the forest with other soldiers. In addition, my father was once poisoned by his first wife, an unrespectful shrew of a woman. My father was force to marry her because of an agreement between parents from both side and because they were close relative. At that same t...