Not All Surprises Are Good

My parents and my sister Denise visited this weekend. It all went according to plan – the Museum of Natural History, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, 2 days in Cardiac Care at St. Luke’s Hospital… Oh wait, that wasn’t in the plan.
The weekend was over and my parents were on the bus on their way back to Rhode Island. I was napping on my couch in pajamas when I got a phone call telling me that my dad had chest pains and passed out on the bus. They had to pull over in Harlem, call 911, and bring him by ambulance to the ER. The good news: he’s fine, and it wasn’t a heart attack. The bad news: have you ever spent 2 days in a big city hospital? Thank God Denise was here too. She’s a nurse, so she handled all the doctors and nurses, asked all the right questions. I’m a control freak, so I handled phone calls, anything that fell into the category of “getting shit done,” and provided comic relief. The beauty of a big family -- everyone plays to their strengths.
It was a weird case of role reversal. Being 200 miles away, I’m never involved in family crises as they’re happening. I hear everything secondhand, and if my mother has her way, after it’s all over. But this time I was the one who was in charge, and my sister Celeste, my parents’ rock, had no idea what was going on. And quite frankly, we both prefer our usual roles. After I dropped them off, I called her and said “They’re back on their way to Rhode Island, where they’re your problem. Sucka…”
My dad had heart surgery in July, and it just so happened to be the week I was on vacation with them that time too, so I’m beginning to think trips with my parents are a bad idea. Maybe he’s allergic to me? The truth, no matter how much I joke about it, is that this is all pretty scary. My parents are aging. And while that’s always been a slow process, it seems to be accelerating pretty rapidly these days.