“WHY DOES BEN CARSON LOOK LIKE A BLACK VERSION OF DAD?”

I chuckled at the truth in my sister’s text message and skimmed through photos of my father on Facebook to show my friends his resemblance to the dimwitted politician. I came across a photo of my mother and father standing with my brother Gabe at camp on family visit day. I could tell how old the photo was by the boyish roundness of my now 18 year old brother’s face. Gabe sported a neon yellow tee shirt that could easily be confused for a dress, baggy jean shorts with the loop around the thigh pocket to hold a hammer, torn up new balance shoes and bunched up white calf socks.

Once I had scoffed at my younger’s brothers appearance, I was taken aback by my father’s- he appeared so slim. His chin was defined and his white polo seemed to cascade down his front with no contour of his stomach evident. I have always remembered my father as being overweight, with the exception of some photos I had uncovered of him and my mother during their dating years (My father proceeded to tell me he was very sick during those years, bulimic as a matter of fact). But, as far as my personal memory, he has always been heavy. My father once teased my older cousin about swallowing watermelon seeds, “be careful, you’ll grow a watermelon in your belly” to which she snickered, “is that what happened to you, Uncle Johnny?”. Compared to my father’s physique now, if it hard to believe we ever teased him about his weight in the past. My father’s larger frame centers around his belly, which protrudes out like a pregnant women. My father does not have fat rolls. His body fat is not soft, nor “jiggly”, but hard, as if he was literally pregnant. My human physiology professor in college explained during a lecture that this happens in chronic cases of alcoholism, something to do with alcohol’s effect on blood proteins and bulk flow in blood vessels.

I have always worried about my father’s health. Depression. Alcoholism. And now, Diabetes. I have only caught glimpses of his health throughout the past four years while I have been away at college. Mostly through phone calls from my mother, “Your father is not taking his diabetes medicine”. Or, “Your father got his blood work back today… And well is not good, don’t tell anyone I told you, he doesn’t want anyone to worry, but-”, that’s usually where I would cut my mother off, brush off her words, tell her that I was busy or didn’t care and hang up the phone before getting too upset.

On multiple occasions, my father complained to me that his foot was numb and tingly. Being the excited pre-physical therapy undergrad I was, I told my father of a patient I saw with similar symptoms, due to the tightness of her piriformis, the muscle that lies on top of the sciatic nerve. I offered him a few stretches to do while he was at his desk job. However, the numbing continued, revealing to be a companion of his onsetting diabetes.

In late December, I received a text message from my father, a photo of him laying on a bed with multiple hoses running to and from his month and nose, “everything is just getting worse for me everyday”, he captioned it. He was participating in a sleep study for sleep apnea, yet another companion of type two diabetes. The photo reminded me of an old acquaintance from grade school, whose dad went in for a “routine” surgery and pasted away because the nurse anesthetist had not accounted for his sleep apnea. I quickly pushed that thought into the back of my head and continued with my day, leaving my father’s text message unanswered.

Walking around the mall in Columbia with him this weekend, I asked my father about his apparent limp. He replied that it was not a limp, but that he was losing even more sensation in his foot.

Guilt runs through me when I consider my father’s health. I live a pretty healthy lifestyle, I am an avid runner and just recently completed a triathlon. I do not drink soda and eat out rarely. On top of that I graduated with a bachelor's of exercise science and will be pursuing physical therapy in August. The spring semester of my senior year in undergrad, I took a class in health counseling. That semester I got motivated enough to encourage my dad to drink less soda, simple enough. He was able to do it too, he weened himself off Diet Coke and substituted for drinking water. When he felt confident in that I asked him what else he wanted to work on. “I don’t know, Mary. Nothing now. I will later.”, he responded.

So, I laid in bed last night, running the same sequence of questions in my head, as I do on countless nights. Maybe I should have gone to college closer to home, maybe I shouldn’t be moving across the country to go to graduate school, maybe I am the one who could turn my father’s health around, maybe there is something more I could do. Maybe, if my father was to collapse to the floor in the mist of my family, I could preform CPR and spare my siblings that trauma, but I am not there….

…and the questions continued to flood my head, all the while, my father sat two feet in front of the television, grasping and stroking his comatose foot.