With images of apple orchards, vineyards and blackberries in my head, I returned home from a beautiful weekend in Sonoma, where I attended my friend’s wedding, and found my father on the couch shaking.

“I am sick. Get me a bucket.”

I brought him a bucket into which he vomited, not once but five times in two hours.

“I am cold, bring me another blanket,” he shouted, trembling.

My sister took his temperature, 103.4 F. I called the advice nurse at Kaiser and she told to check his blood sugar since he is diabetic. His Glucometer was not working. She told me to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital ASAP. Afraid of what the paramedics cost would be, my mom, sister, and I managed to move my dad into my mom’s car. My mom drove 50 miles/hour on our suburban 30 mile/hour roads at 10pm on a Sunday night to the hospital, seven minutes away. I ran and got my dad a wheelchair and wheeled him into the hospital. We weren’t the only ones there.

Dad got sick the day after a full moon (August 16, 2008). Bad idea! It turns out that the myth about people going crazy or getting strange diseases on full moons is not fiction. The nurses told me that they were super busy all weekend with very sick patients.

Unfortunately, diabetes doesn’t consider schedules when it strikes. Full moon, crescent moon, harvest moon or cloudy skies, the sugar disease runs rampant whenever it wants to.

The staff took his vital signs and determined that he was in fact quite ill. The lower part of his right was red, just like in April when he had a similar cellulitis infection. There were no hospital rooms available as they were all occupied with moon-inflicted patients. For over an hour, my dad was on a hospital bed in the corridor of the ER with catheters hooked up to saline and antibiotics running in his veins. He complained of a fever, but the nurses recommended that he only have a light blanket so his body could exit the excess heat. More blankets would make his fever go up.

Finally, we got a room. The young ER resident repeated the same battery of questions we had already answered to the ER nurse. We couldn’t leave my dad alone since he is hearing impaired and speaks limited English. None of the doctors were versed in the language of Tolstoy and Pushkin, so we had to stay and interpret. I was cold and used the blankets that my dad was not allowed to use. I accompanied him to the X-ray room as my mom slept. It was certain that he would have to spend the night in the hospital. Exhausted and cold, we left the ER after four cold hours and arrived home at 2am.

Dad stayed in his comfortable hospital room for six days. Though I was attending a conference, I made time to go to the hospital when I could. I had trouble sleeping while he was in the hospital because I was thinking about why he became diabetic and hearing impaired. While working in a medical light factory in Palo Alto, the loud machinery ruined my father’s hearing. He can barely understand us when we speak without wearing a hearing aid. Having arrived in the US at the age of 46, he and my mom both struggled to hold down jobs and make ends meet. He was happy to have that factory job for 10 plus years because his income, though low, was steady. Food choices often leaned towards the cheap and easy rather than the healthy. Potatoes, bread and pasta are the white venom on which diabetes breeds. Had it not been for my parents’ hard work and sacrifice, I would not be in this country or would have lived with more financial instability.

It pained me to see him suffering in the hospital as I walked easily as the benefactor of his efforts.

I had to write a speech last week to deliver at the Naturalization ceremony for new immigrants that I was going to deliver in both Campbell and San Francisco. I couldn’t think of what to write and was thinking about my dad’s situation. Twelve hours before I was due to deliver my speech to 800 people, I went to my dad’s bedside at 10pm at the hospital to ask for ideas. The next day, while I was standing on the stage of the Campbell Heritage Theater watching the excited new citizens take their oath to be US citizens, I couldn’t keep my eyes dry as I was thinking about how happy my parents were when they became US citizens and were no longer stateless Soviets. The lady who volunteered to sign the national anthem had to go backstage and get me tissues. In my speech, I mentioned my hospital bedside conversation with my father.

When I listened to Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention about her father, who with his multiple sclerosis, woke up an hour early everyday to get dressed to go to his blue collar job in Chicago, I thought of my dad and had tears in my eyes.

We should all be thankful for the sacrifices of our parents.

(My dad is now at home and I have been initiated in the practice of preparing syringes with insulin. I have been dad-sitting all week. My dad likes it and thinks I should become a nurse. No way. I don’t know the difference between my liver and kidneys:))

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