California DMV is a complete disaster zone. Why would someone who walks in somehow manage to wait for less time than someone with an appointment? I guess I shouldn’t complain because I ended up benefiting from this today to renew my driver’s license. I was in and out within an hour this morning.

It’s a pretty depressing place, though. Everyone is in a bad mood because they all know that they have to wait — first, just to get into the building (it was raining today, so that made this part even more fun than usual), and the second time, to actually get the real work done, whether that’s a written test, fingerprinting, an eye exam, and/or get your photo taken. I had to fill out a form, have my eyes checked, get fingerprinted, and take my picture. It’s been 13 years since I’ve had my photo taken for my driver’s license. I am smiling in the last photo when I was just 15, but in this photo, I am half smiling. I couldn’t bring myself to fully smile because I remembered the last time I really looked at anyone’s California driver’s license, it was my brother’s — the license he never got to use because he died before he had the chance.

It was sitting in his desk when I came home on July 24th last year. Ed had very recently sat in person at the DMV, waiting to renew like everyone else, because as per California’s stupid, inefficient law, you can only renew via internet or mail two times in a row; the next time, you have to go in person to renew. He had his number called just the way I did, and then had his photo taken. His photo was absolutely miserable. He looked depressed, with eyes as though they’d given up on the world because the world had given up on him. His lips were straight, almost frowning without even really trying. My eyes watered when I saw it.

His old license was in his wallet when our parents picked it up from the Marin County Coroner’s Office. That’s why the new one wasn’t in his wallet. And I had panicked on July 22 when my mom informed me that he was missing and said his driver’s license was in his desk, because I thought… oh my god, he doesn’t want to be found. That’s why he left his wallet behind.

Life really sucks when even a visit to the DMV reminds you of your brother who committed suicide.

My dad is in his own private regular room, away from the constant noise and lights of the Cardiovasular Intensive Care Unit, and he’s looking and sounding better each day. Today, he was having an irregular heart beat, so he had to slow down his walking a bit. A few of the nurses have commended us for always being there and taking turns spending the night with him. One of them was remarking how pretty and loving I am with my dad. “You just have one daughter?” a few of them asked my mom. “Yes, just one child,” my mom said, half smiling weakly.

I felt so angry when I heard the words come out of her mouth. I know that this is the only easy response to nurses and medical professionals who we will likely (fingers crossed, no offense) not have to see again, but I felt hurt anyway. I’m an only child now? I’m not an only child. I have a big brother. He may not be living, but he still exists.

I don’t want my brother to be forgotten. The idea that anyone would forget Ed angers me to no end. I know my parents won’t forget about him and will think about him constantly each day, but I hate the thought that we have to act “normal” as though he doesn’t exist around strangers. I won’t forget Ed. It’s not even the slightest bit possible. And the funny thing is… now, I think of Ed in a different way… because I am thinking about him in the context of leaving me alone in this earthly world to care for our aging parents by myself. It’s a lonely feeling, a terrifying responsibility. I have no one else in the world to lean on except myself.

I’ve been doing a lot of research in the last few days on artery blockages, bypass surgery, and this treadmill stress test that ultimately indicated that my dad needed an angiogram to identify his artery blockages. I’ve spoken with both his surgeon and his anesthesiologist at length to learn more (both of whom were incredibly patient, listened, and answered all my questions thoroughly), and I’ve also discussed this with others who are familiar with coronary artery bypass surgeries because they know people close to them who have had them. What I have found is that as common as bypass surgeries are, treadmill stress tests are just as common, if not more common, and are done regularly on people who are at high risk of heart disease, as indicated by family history. The American Heart Association recommends this as the #1 test for anyone with a history of heart disease in the family. It’s not a secret, and I don’t need to be a doctor to know this. It’s all available online for anyone to see and learn. They are done on people as young as their 20s and 30s who have indicated a family history of heart problems. Even Chris is one of these people, as he had this test done two years ago.

So you can imagine how angry I got after thinking about this whole chain of events. Why did my uncle have to tell my dad to ask his primary care doctor for the stress test — after his own stress test, which showed my uncle had a blockage? Why did my dad’s doctor not proactively recommend it to my dad, knowing my dad has heart issues already as well as high blood pressure and a family history of heart disease? Every person before my dad on that side of the family has died of a heart attack. My dad is very honest and open about discussing these issues and has made this all very clear to his primary care doctor. I posed this question to my dad’s surgeon, who paused and said, “That’s a very good question — one for your dad’s primary care doctor to answer.”

I scheduled some time with my dad’s primary care doctor to chat tonight. Needless to say, the conversation did not go so well. When he called me back, he was very curt and seemed confused as to why his patient’s daughter would be calling him. yet when I spoke with the other two doctors, they completely empathized and understood immediately why I would call — because I’m a concerned daughter. I explained to him my thoughts, and when I asked him point blank why he never recommended this specific test to my dad and had to wait until my dad asked HIM if he could do it, that was when the drama began.

He immediately started interrupting me, claiming I had “misinformation” and “misinterpreted” what I was reading and what I heard from the other two doctors. He said my dad exhibited no chest pains or tightness. To this, I insisted that this test is supposed to be preventive, not reactive — it certainly can (and should) be done reactively, but I thought the whole point of having a primary care doctor is to prevent problems, not just treat them after you are already ill? He insisted he was right and I was wrong, that I didn’t have the proper training to understand any of this. It was a lot of condescension, with him constantly raising his voice at me. Not one to be outdone, I made sure he knew I was not going to back down and just raised my voice even louder. And I told him to stop interrupting me. Here’s a hint: if I tell you that I’m not done speaking, it means you should probably shut up and let me speak. That doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I mean it. It became quite a shouting match in the end. I told him, I guess we’ll need to agree to disagree here. He laughed and said, “There’s nothing to disagree about. This is all very clear.” A few more back and forths, and I said, “This is going nowhere. This conversation is now over.” And I hung up.

While he was rude, condescending, and everything opposite of calm and empathetic, the worst part was when he actually told me that “family history” of any disease, whether it’s heart disease or cancer, is defined NOT by the family members before you such as your father, your grandfather, etc., but by those in your current generation, so your brother, sister, cousins, etc. I’d never heard anything more ludicrous in my life. “So you’re going to tell me that just because my father’s father and my great grandfather both died of heart attacks that this indicates nothing about my father’s risk for getting heart disease or a heart attack?” I asked him in complete shock.  He said yes — that’s how “family history” is defined by those in the medical profession. Oh, and I think he completely forgot my dad told him that his older brother died from a massive heart attack at age 65. That was over 14 years ago.

There’s a reason why the American Breast Cancer Foundation advocates that women whose mothers or grandmothers have had breast cancer should get tested earlier — because that’s how family history is defined – by anyone in your blood line. The same goes for anyone else.

I’m deeply dismayed at the fact that there are doctors like this who exist and can still practice medicine. Clearly, being proactive is not a valued or strong suit here. And this man, Richard Tang, is supposed to be the director of the Phase Clinic for Prevention of Heart Attack and Stroke at Kaiser in San Francisco.

I just put a flight itinerary on hold to go home next Wednesday. Sudden visits home are never for a good, happy reason.

I just found out last night that my dad failed a stress test for his heart, and then through an angiogram, he discovered that his left artery has a severe blockage. As a result of this, he has to have heart bypass surgery this Thursday morning. He’s going to be in the hospital for five nights after that, and then after that will be mostly recovering at home for the following 3-4 months.

The main reason my dad had this stress test done was because my uncle, his younger brother, had the same test done after sensing some chest pains, and he found he also had an artery blockage, yet it wasn’t severe enough for a bypass surgery, luckily for him. I spoke with my dad’s doctor tonight, and she reassured me how common this surgery was and how they do over a thousand of these surgeries in this hospital alone every year. The success rate is over 99.5%, with less than half a percent of patients experiencing complications. She said my dad was the ideal candidate given his vitals and his relatively young age, as most of the patients they do this on are between 70-90.

I know I’m supposed to be rational about this and calmed by all these facts, yet I can’t help but feel scared. Imagining my dad’s chest being opened up and his heart stopped for 30-45 minutes is absolutely terrifying.

I thought about Ed a lot this evening as I was learning about all of this from my parents and my dad’s doctor. A part of me knows that if he were here, he’d probably be hysterical, too, the way our mother is now. He was always the worrying type. Part of me wishes that we could share this experience together. The other part of me is a bit happy that he doesn’t have to deal with this stress — the stress of living and coming to terms with the fact that not everyone around you will live healthily forever.

I’m going to hate every visit to the dentist for the rest of my life.

My dentist today walked me through an X-ray of my teeth. He explained why my teeth are shaped the way they are, and then showed me what my bone structure is supposed to look like versus what it actually looks like. That’s never a good thing. Then, he said that basically everything wrong with my mouth is not because of poor hygiene or diet because he can clearly see I take good care to brush and floss more thoroughly than about 99 percent of his patients, but it’s all because of my grinding problem. Why do I get food stuck in my teeth everywhere so much more than I ever could remember before? Oh, that’s because of my grinding, too, which created those gaps. Strangely, my retainers still fit perfectly. I guess the gaps don’t affect the actual bite structure.

These are all signs of age. And I’m only 28 going on 29 soon.

A colleague of mine has a friend who works at LearnVest and was able to give away friends and family passes to their annual LearnVest workshop event this year, so she invited me to come with her tonight. There were over 2,500 people who attended the event, the majority being young working professional women, who LearnVest originally targeted when they began in 2009. There were a couple of good speeches around happiness, what defines it, and how money fits in, but for the most part, the topics being discussed were already things I was aware of and have been actively doing.

I guess I take for granted a lot of the things I learned in my money workshops during my college years, as well as advice I’ve been given from my dad as well as finance books I’ve read shortly after graduation. Given all of that learning, I just always thought it was the normal thing to do to at least contribute 10 percent to my 401K and retirement funds, to spend no more than 25 percent on housing and rent, or to have at least three to six months of ’emergency funds’ stowed away in the sad event I’d lose my job. I always knew that once I would have children, I’d buy additional life insurance right away in the event that I’d tragically die prematurely. I guess these are the things that I have no idea about when it comes to what the average other person is doing. In some way, I live in a money bubble because I feel out of touch with what the average person does with her money. I cannot relate at all to people who live paycheck to paycheck, and I can’t relate to the women who think it’s the norm to buy at least a pair or two of shoes a month.

It was a good reminder to hear today, though, that there’s really no such thing as having “enough” money. It’s always relative, and we tend to never think we have “enough.” People with a million dollars think they need three times that to be fully satisfied. People with $3 million think they need $9 million to have enough, and so forth. We get settled into our new “status,” and nothing ever becomes enough. And if you asked me today if I thought I had “enough” money to afford a child, I’d say no. Nothing seems to be “enough” no matter what your net worth or salary. It’s really true among people I know.

Today, my cousin, who is taking three months of unpaid time off to “tend” to his two-year-old son, and I were having an instant message conversation online. His baby, who supposedly needs five different therapists five times a week because of multiple learning disabilities that he and his wife believe the child has, is being smothered by the two of them. They could probably give my mother a run for her money when it comes to who can be the most overprotective parents in the world.

I’m telling him that I think he and his wife seriously need to consider marriage therapy. They clearly have no respect for each other and don’t listen to each other at all; she calls him an “awful father” every day. He has no respect for her job and thinks she should fulfill traditional female roles at home and not do paid work, even though she loves her job and works for a company that takes pretty good care of her. I tell him that I’ve done therapy before and found it very helpful. He is clueless. He asks, “Why would you need to go therapy?” All three of my male cousins lack any sense of emotional intelligence, so I responded, “To deal with Ed’s death, the circumstances around it and how it came to be, and to come to terms with how stupid people in our dysfunctional family are like you.” His response? “Oh.”

Sometimes I read certain entries on this blog, and I can’t help but think that if someone else read this, they’d think I’m making up all these stories. No, this was not made up. This is real… sadly. I wish I were making this up.

So, my mom called tonight to let me know that I did something to hurt her terribly on the Friday before I left. She was hurt so badly that she has thought about it every day since I have left. It’s been five weeks now.

Apparently, that day, she asked me to bring a glass of orange juice to my dad in the bedroom. He wasn’t in the bedroom when I got there, so I figured I’d give it to him when he came back upstairs from the basement.

Supposedly, I’d already set out a glass of orange juice on the dining room table for Chris when he got back from work that afternoon, so it was there waiting for him.

My mom asked why I brought the glass of juice for my dad into the kitchen. I said he was rummaging through stuff downstairs and I’d give him the orange juice when he came back up. She snapped at me, took the glass downstairs, and gave it to him.

Clearly, what I have proven to my mother through this incident is that I care about Chris more than my dad because I had a glass out for him already (I don’t remember this and doubt its validity… especially since I distinctly remember pouring him a glass after he arrived), and I wouldn’t go downstairs to the basement (that you can’t even safely walk through without tripping over something) to give my dad his juice.

“You care about this boy who isn’t even your husband yet more than your own father; your father does EVERYTHING for you!” she yelled today. “You’re supposed to put your parents first before everyone! You hurt me so much that day that you don’t even realize!”

I think the term “hypersensitive” and “overreactive” are terms that don’t even begin to encompass what my mother is.

Yesterday, I went to my cousin’s baby’s birthday party at his new apartment in Brooklyn. After 1.5 hours of commuting, I finally arrived to a sea of barking orders from my cousin’s wife to my cousin. “Didn’t I tell you to get the cake? Did you even hear me? What did I say about spreading the food out on the table? Can’t you do anything? How did you let Ryan drink out of Zachary’s bottle? Weren’t you watching him?” It was probably one of the worst public treatments of a wife toward her husband I’ve ever seen — it far surpasses how bad it’s been in previous times I have seen them together. The last time I saw them was this time last year, as pathetic as it sounds. My cousin seemed so helpless, squeaking out quiet responses every time each barking order came out of his wife’s mouth.

I wonder if this is part of the reason that my cousin’s baby is seeing five different therapists five days a week. Maybe he can tell in his own way that his parents have an extremely unhappy, horrible marriage, and that they are priming him for a life of anger, resentment, and dysfunction.

I had a dream that it was Ed’s funeral again, except this time, the funeral took place in a large cathedral-like setting with stained glass and long aisles. I walked down the aisle to view him in his casket, and I notice that for some reason his head is positioned so that his chin is pointing straight up. I immediately notify the funeral service director and start explaining how ridiculous and unconventional that type of positioning is for a viewing/funeral ceremony, and she disagrees with me, saying that this is the norm. We continue to argue and eventually she relents and says she will do what I wish.

The clock says 7:25. I’m assuming it’s an evening service that will begin at 7:30. Chris insists that I try to relax by going outside, where there is a playground with lots of swings. Go on the swings, he said. It will calm you down.

The service eventually commences, but my parents are so displeased with the entire thing that they demand that the service be done over again completely the following evening. How are we going to get all these people to come back for a second funeral of the same person the next day? I wonder. I don’t want to get either of them angry, so I say nothing.

I think it’s the first time I can remember where I’ve actually dreamt of his funeral after he passed away. I’m used to seeing him living in my dreams and speaking to me in some way. I don’t want to see him dead in my dreams. Isn’t he already dead in real life? Dreams are supposed to be for us to live out what is not our reality.