We will have been traveling for 24 hours, including transit and layover time in JFK, LAX, and Sydney due to a delayed first flight from JFK. I slept for a good amount of time on the LAX to Sydney leg, and when I thought for a moment about foregoing my mouth guard during my sleep, I thought that would be a pretty terrible idea given that my mother has hung up on me twice and tried to blame me for all her suffering, and I’d probably end up with chipped or broken teeth by the time we arrived in Sydney if I didn’t wear it. At this point, I can’t really mentally afford any broken parts of my body.

For my conscious time during these flights to Melbourne, I wondered a lot about parent-child relationships — what makes them work, what makes them not, and the constant blame game that seems to happen in even the most functional parent-child relationships. I wondered about what led to my brother’s untimely death, and all that I wish he had from our parents that he was deprived of. It’s easy for me to blame them, but how can I really blame them when they had inadequate love from their parents, as well, which led to their ultimate inadequacies in raising us? All they are doing is continuing the cycle of dysfunction, criticism, and emotional abuse that they endured as children. They are only doing what they know. It’s sad, but it’s all they know.

My dad’s appointment with his cardiologist today has resulted in the discovery that his left leg is inflamed from the graft taken, so they’re recommending that this be treated intravenously. This means he will need to stay at the hospital.

They’ve also found that he has too much excessive liquid in his left lung, so they want to drain it by inserting a small tube in there.

How did I find all this out? My mom calls after over a week of refusing to speak to me, and she says in an angry tone, “Your dad has to go back into the hospital. That’s all I am going to say. That is all.” Then, she hangs up before I can say anything.

My dad calls back later to let me know the details. As he is trying to talk to me, he has to stop every now and then to tell my mother to calm down and stop being so excitable. Finally, she grabs the phone from him and angrily tells me not to tell anyone because no one cares and everyone has only caused her to suffer, especially me. “You went ahead and told everyone Ed died. You made me suffer so much you wouldn’t even believe!” She tells me spitefully to enjoy my vacation, as she knows I’m leaving today. As I try to respond, she yells “Shut your mouth!” and hangs up. I wonder who was lucky enough to witness her yelling at me like this in the hospital.

It’s amazing that I still want to keep calling back. I guess that goes to show how much I love them despite how sick in the head they are.

It’s Christmas time again, and the second Christmas when Ed won’t be around. Although Christmas is my favorite time of the year, it’s now always going to be one of those bittersweet times because he will never be here again. Even if I ever wanted to spend Christmas at home with him, the option is now gone. This season, it’s even more frustrating and conflicting for me given my dad’s recent heart surgery and his recovery, and my mother trying to make me feel guilty for not being home during this time and instead flying off to Australia. Ed’s void is even more painfully apparent to me.

For so many people everywhere, Christmas and this entire “holiday season” is such a source of stress because they have to “deal” with family that they don’t particularly get along with that well. It’s a time when all your frustrations start coming to the surface and you finally have to face them head on. It’s a really sad thing because in theory, these holidays are supposed to bring people together to be thankful and ultimately show their love for one another. Although I haven’t spent Christmas with blood relatives in now three years, I always am reminded at this time of year of all of our tensions, the things Ed and I expected our mother to explode at us for, the arguments she and my dad would pick at us for participating in meals with my cousins, some of which they said acted like “kings and queens” because they would never help with the clean-up or the dishes. None of those things are an issue anymore because those events no longer happen, but the ghost of those events still continue to haunt me.

When I look back, I wish I could have had just one really happy Christmas with my brother — just one. It would be one Christmas where no one yelled at us for anything nonsensical or overly sensitive, no one put him down and told him that “people look down on us because of you,” where people gave him gifts that they really thought he’d enjoy, not just gifts for the sake of giving that had no thought. It would be a Christmas where we actually had a real tree again, fully decorated with rainbow colored lights and all the gorgeous Christmas ornaments he so tastefully used to pick out for me.

Christmas is Ed’s favorite holiday. I feel him a lot around this time, and it hurts. It hurts that the world doesn’t stop to remember him.

My dad finally went to the doctor’s office today, and after having his chest X-rayed, we’ve discovered that he actually does not have pneumonia or any chest infections thankfully, but he has excess water trapped in his lungs as a result of the surgery. This basically just means that he needs to increase dosage for a certain medication he’s taking to empty the lungs out so he can breathe properly and stop the violent coughing. I was really relieved.

However, I wasn’t that relieved to hear my dad say to me, “I’m just saying this (lowers his voice), but you could have cancelled your Australia trip this month to come home to help Mommy.” My dad doesn’t make random suggestions like this unless someone’s been feeding his head with gossip and bad mouthing — i.e. my mother. I told him that we booked this trip way back in the summer — long before we knew anything was even remotely wrong with him. “I came back for over a week and a half to help out last minute. Does that suddenly not mean anything anymore?” I asked. I felt so hurt. “It’s okay, Yvonne, my dad responded. “I understand.” No, you really do not.

Nothing is ever enough for her. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I am always the selfish one, the one who never thinks about family. I am the one who never cares.

Last night, I felt the sickest I’ve felt since December 2012, when I supposedly got “allergies” when I went to Melbourne for the first time. This time, it was a different kind of “sick,” though — my entire body was in pain, my throat was sore, I hacked up all this phlegm, and I had a massive headache. I went to bed at 7:30pm and didn’t get up until 8am the next day. While I was in bed, I wondered what caused me to get this sick. Was it all the time I’ve spent flying in the last month — for work, then family, then vacation? Was it the terrible and uncomfortable hospital stays with my dad and the cold of my parents’ house in San Francisco? Or maybe, it’s all the above, in addition to all the unnecessary stress that my parents have imposed on me with their constant guilt tripping on my mom’s side and my dad’s stubbornness and laziness to get his persistent cough checked out by a doctor? I felt helpless last night and thought, I need to see my brother.

And so he came. He doesn’t always come when I ask, but this time, he came in the strangest way in a dream.

I was in my parents’ kitchen, and I heard a rustling from the porch through the back room of the kitchen. I opened the porch door, and in came Ed. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

He carried a stack of dishes into the house. “I was washing dishes outside with the rain water,” he responded. He explained that because of the drought in California, our mother had asked him to leave buckets of water outside so that when it did rain, we could save and reuse the water by using it to clean dirty dishes.

I was so struck by seeing him that after he put the dishes down, I threw my arms around him and hugged him tightly. I could feel his arms come around me, too. I put my mouth close to his ear and whispered, “Don’t do that again.” I kissed the side of his face, and I let him go. He walked out of the kitchen, and I started crying.

I thought about this dream on and off throughout today, and I realized that as nonsensical as this dream was, it was really representative of the lack of logic and stupidity that exists in our family. I have to deal with our dad ignoring potential symptoms of pneumonia that could potentially kill him, our mother blaming me for apparently not caring enough to be there with them 24/7, and their general stupid decision making when it comes to all things related to their health and happiness. As much as I miss Ed, with each day that passes since my dad’s surgery, I’m even happier that he isn’t here to deal with the crap I have to deal with now.

I haven’t been to the gym properly since before I left for San Francisco for my dad’s bypass surgery. Today, I finally went back, and it was so difficult. Just five minutes of running on the treadmill had me puffing, and it was so tempting to stop, but I decided that all the people around me gaining weight would be motivation enough for me to keep going and even faster. That sounds pretty mean, to use others’ shortcomings to motivate you, but if it works, then it works.

After my workout while I was in the shower, I thought about people I’ve known since middle school, high school, college, and what they looked like then versus now. Even for those I haven’t kept in touch with and have just stayed “Facebook friends” with, it’s as though so many are just letting go of themselves when it comes to their weight and bodies, and they haven’t even had children yet. We all make excuses and say we don’t have time to do things like go running or hit the gym, but as always, we make time for what’s important, even if it means dragging ourselves there, knowing it will be worth it in the end.

I’m back in New York, back to the grind, and back to my parents and their never changing ways. Since coming home after his bypass surgery, my dad for the first time in my life has admitted that the house is absolutely freezing, and the heat needs to be kept on. He had massive coughing fits until we turned on the heat and allowed him to breathe in warm air. Before I left, I insisted to my parents that they keep the central heating on so that my dad wouldn’t cough. He’s particularly susceptible to getting pneumonia because of his limited lung capacity as a result of the open heart surgery.

The last two days haven’t been good for him. He’s been kept awake by his coughing spasms, at times staying awake from 2-6am just coughing constantly. I feared he had caught pneumonia and insisted he make an appointment to see his primary care doctor immediately. He said he would e-mail Dr. Tang.

“Why are you e-mailing him? We already discussed that you were going to change primary care doctors after the surgery. He’s not a good doctor, and he doesn’t care about you!” I said, trying not to raise my voice.

“Well, how do I know that there is a doctor in the Kaiser network that is any better than him?” he asked weakly. I told him that his anesthesiologist said that she had a number of recommendations for more proactive doctors, and I was going to call her to get their names so that he could switch. He said okay.

My parents’ laziness and stubbornness is coming out again, except this is a true matter of life and death because this is his health.. during his critical recovery period, and there’s no way I’m going to let them make lazy, bone-headed decisions regarding this.

Tonight, Chris and I are leaving for our Thanksgiving trip to Budapest and Hungary. We booked this trip with miles way back in February and solidified our accommodations shortly after, so I think fate worked out when my dad’s surgery happened to be about two weeks ahead of this trip. It allowed me to come home, take care of my dad and be a comfort to my mom, and also still go on this trip. However, my mom wasn’t too thrilled when she found out we were taking a European vacation just three days after I left San Francisco to go back to New York. “I really don’t think you should be going so far away with your father like this. But you clearly have made up your mind and have made your decision, so I hope you have a good time and be safe.” That’s my mother’s very polite but jagged way of saying, you’re selfish for taking a trip to Europe while I have to “suffer” taking care of your father every day.

To be completely rational, my dad is progressing amazingly well and can do almost everything by himself now, with the exception of bathing or climbing hills or running marathons. He’s barred from driving for at least six to eight weeks. But other than that, he is doing well for his stage of recovery. Because of this, I don’t feel bad that I’m going on this trip, but my mom wants to perceive and treat him like an invalid who needs to have eyes on him 24/7. In addition, I’m still going to call home from Austria and Hungary, so it’s not like we won’t be connected. I felt guilty for about a second, and then I realized it’s just her way of manipulating me to say all these things. Then, I downed two drinks at the lounge and boarded our flight.

I came back to the office after a week and a half of being in San Francisco. Some people were really happy to see me, some didn’t even realize I was away, and others knew why I was away but didn’t bother to ask me how my dad was doing.

I try to be optimistic about the world and about life, but sometimes, when people don’t even attempt to even be fake at wanting to know how you are doing outside of work, it makes me think that the world isn’t really getting any better. All we are – we’re just worker bees. We come in, do our job, and then we have to leave. What we do outside of that, it’s like some people really don’t care at all.

I’m spending another night at the hospital. My dad is feeling fine — his chest incision and areas of his legs where the surgeons took the grafts are healing normally, but now, he has an infection on his arm from the IV because it seems that his skin was so thick that the nurses had problems placing the IV into his vein. His arm swelled up to about one and a half times its normal size, and it got to a point where when the nurse took his blood pressure, the blood pressure machine cuff got so tight on his arm that my dad said he felt like his whole arm was going to explode — the woes of having a dad with literally thick skin.

This will be his eighth night in the hospital. We were originally hoping he’d only have to stay here for six nights, but it seems it’s going on for eight or nine now. Part of me is a bit relieved that he will be staying because it means less care taking on my mom’s part and more for the staff here to do, but the other part of me just wants him settled back at home to be comfortable and in his own space. Because my time here is coming to an end, my mom is gradually hinting that I should extend my stay since she says “I can’t handle all this by myself. There is so much to do. How am I supposed to do all this myself?” The guilt tripping had to start at some point, so I guess that some point is now. In the beginning, I heard a lot of “thank you for supporting Daddy and me.” Somewhere along the way, it became, “I’m not going to be angry with you if you decide not to, but you really should stay here longer.” Thanks, Mom.