Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [3]
“What’s his prognosis?” I asked.
“It depends on a lot of things,” he said, “but most people who are resistant to treatment live anywhere from six months to two years.”
My father’s body was resisting treatment. The codeine and prednisone he’d been prescribed by the emergency room physician were neither relieving his cough nor slowing down the gradually irreversible stiffening and scarring of his lungs.
“You should tell your loved ones about your father’s condition,” Dr. Padman said, as though this was the kind of information one could keep to oneself.
Was this the standard way to tell a family member (without the patient’s permission) that the patient was dying? Perhaps he didn’t want to add to my father’s stress by telling him directly that his disease was incurable. Later, however, he would plainly write it in his letter for my father’s appeal to the Taxi and Limousine Commission: “My patient André Miracin Danticat suffers from an incurable condition for which he is required to take codeine.”
My father never discussed the letter either before or after he xeroxed it and sent the original to the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which denied his appeal.
What causes an illness like this? I wondered as Dr. Padman and I waited for my father to return from his pulmonary function test. Could it be the persistent car fumes from the twenty-five-plus years my father had worked as a cabdriver? Carcinogens from the twenty-plus years he smoked as a young man, even though he hadn’t smoked in more than twenty-five years?
“What about a lung transplant?” I asked Dr. Padman. “Could my father have a lung transplant?”
“He’s sixty-nine years old,” he said, as though this too was news to me. “I’m afraid he’s past the age where he’d be put on the list. Besides, the transplant is no guarantee. There’s a very high probability of rejection.”
“Can he have surgery to cut out the bad part of the lung and leave the rest?” I asked.
“Both lungs in their entirety are scarred.”
I was beginning to feel that whatever I told him would be countered by some unworkable obstruction.
I heard my father’s shoes dragging across the floor, heading back toward us. I had come to recognize the sound of his loafers since he’d stopped lifting his feet while walking, to alleviate the pressure of literally having to carry his own weight.
Edie was standing behind him when he appeared in the doorway. Her shoulders drooping, she momentarily seemed as breathless as my father, who had been unable to get through the test. Each time she asked him to breathe into the tube, she reported, he would nearly collapse from coughing.
In the past two months or so, when my father stood for too long, his body would shake as though he might suddenly fall over. His body was shaking now. I got up and helped him into the chair across from the doctor, whom I expected to begin talking again, explaining my father’s condition to him. Surely he had only been practicing on me and was going to also tell my father, how “bad” the disease was, how many months he might have left to live.
He didn’t. Instead he prescribed more prednisone and codeine. My father didn’t say anything. He pushed his head back against the wall, closed his eyes and tried to take deep breaths, which came out as gasps.
Going down in the hospital elevator, still not fully understanding all that had taken place, I kept my eyes on the flashing numbers and avoided looking at my father, who even before he was sick had always been uneasy in unfamiliar surroundings. Now he seemed even more apprehensive, lost in the isolated world of the unwell.
In the car I broached again the very first question Dr. Padman had posed to him.
“How do you feel, Papa?” I asked in Creole. “Ki jan w santi w?”
Nou la, he said. Not bad. Okay, even. Not by usual standards, but what he’d come to consider okay. Not coughing too much. Not breathing too hard. Driving was fine because he was not exerting too much energy, but walking was difficult. Walking was hell.
“I’m going to drop