The Damage In Your Heart

The mood around these parts lately has been dark enough to match the weather. (Don’t worry, my fam­ily is fine on that front.)

Last week, my great-​aunt col­lapsed, and when she was taken to the hos­pi­tal, they found a blocked artery, so the doc­tors per­formed angio­plasty and placed a stent. How­ever, some com­pli­ca­tions arose, includ­ing an infec­tion after surgery, and she also expe­ri­enced swelling because her body was retain­ing too much water for some rea­son. Di Hai and Di Ngoc actu­ally flew down last Wednes­day to see her in the hos­pi­tal, and when they left on Sun­day, she was still there.

Mike’s (Chi Ba’s fiancé’s) grand­mother passed away a cou­ple of days ago, too.

Clos­est to home, though, is my grand­fa­ther. Although his con­di­tion isn’t crit­i­cal, it is dete­ri­o­rat­ing. He recently had surgery to remove the cataracts from his eyes, and dur­ing the pro­ce­dure, the doc­tor found that he had glau­coma. His dia­betes has also got­ten worse recently, and he had to start get­ting insulin shots daily.

The worst of is, though, my grand­mother has been advis­ing him against treat­ment. She told Ong Ngoai not to take shots because she heard from peo­ple that they are extremely painful. She doesn’t want him to get surgery for glau­coma because she doesn’t want him to go blind. And Ong Ngoai’s kid­neys are dam­aged from his dia­betes, and the doc­tors say that if they get any worse, he’ll have to start dial­y­sis. She had him con­vinced that dial­y­sis was excru­ci­at­ing tor­ture and that he’d rather die than live through that.

I just don’t under­stand her. That fear and mis­trust of mod­ern med­i­cine, com­bined with her incon­ceiv­able sense of deter­min­ism (“he’s got dia­betes, it’s just meant to be that these things will hap­pen to him”) and her mis­placed way of try­ing to shield Ong Ngoai from pain… She doesn’t seem to under­stand that every­thing has risk, but these pro­ce­dures greatly reduce the risk of leav­ing things as they are, and the pain Ong Ngoai might suf­fer dur­ing these pro­ce­dures is noth­ing com­pared to the pain he’ll feel as his body shuts down if he doesn’t have them done.

And I see the same fear in oth­ers in my fam­ily, if in dif­fer­ent facets of life — from fear of tech­nol­ogy and com­put­ers in my elders, to fear of try­ing new foods in the lit­tle cousins. I hope that no mat­ter how old I get, I never get to the point where I refuse to try new things.

Tags: America, Chi Ba, Computer, Family, Food, Lin S, Technology