Faraway dad / Problem child
Today: Felipe De La Hoz, journalism lecturer at NYU and member of the New York Daily News Editorial Board; and Emily Flake, cartoonist, writer, performer, illustrator, and proprietress of St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency for Ladies in Williamsport, PA.
Issue No. 590
Destiny Takes a Hand
Felipe De La Hoz
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE, Middle-Age Edition
Emily Flake
Destiny Takes a Hand
by Felipe De La Hoz
Late last year my father sent me a message asking if he could call and chat for a bit, which was unusual. Not that we don’t often speak; all my life, my dad and I have had a close-knit relationship, predicated on both my parents’ decision to treat me more or less like a full person regardless of my age. But these days my dad and I mostly text, in conversations meandering back and forth about politics, art, food. A short entreaty to sit down and talk on the phone was uncharacteristic and, I feared, ominous.
We riffed a bit on life before he got to the meat of the matter in his distinctive, cautious cadence: he’d been having some recurring pain and other issues that had led him to the emergency room, where an abnormal mass in his abdomen was discovered. You can guess where this is going. I wouldn’t say that there are any types of cancer anyone wants to get, but what you really don’t want to get is pancreatic cancer, a stubborn and often deadly disease that generally requires surgery if it can be treated at all. Something I had not known before but learned quickly, when I told friends and nearly every time, they winced or spluttered.
Before going any further, let me say this—my dad is fine. While he looks distressingly thin in recent photos, he received multiple rounds of chemo before and after a successful surgery and has, as of this writing, been declared cancer-free. I am grateful to his medical team in Quito, and for the generations of doctors and researchers that have made it possible for a man to go from very sick with one of the most aggressive forms of cancer there is to practically recovered in eight months flat.
After this call, though, I had two immediate worries: about his treatment, as you might expect; and about the United States Department of Homeland Security, which you might not. The latter because, for years now, our illustrious national security agency, through its U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services subcomponent, has been sitting on a relatively straightforward application of mine that has already gone through multiple twists and turns, an application that would be considered abandoned the moment I set foot outside the United States.
Keep us breathing fire!
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