Before our iridology scans, she made us sign disclaimers saying we knew she wasn’t a medical doctor and could not cure any illness. This, she explained, was a legal necessity even though she had healed many people-as my father’s pastor had told him-including some terminal cancer patients.
She snapped a picture of each of my father’s pupils, then enlarged them on a computer screen. Leaning in, she examined the whites of his eyes on the screen.
“You need plenty of vitamins.” She pointed out some tiny spots to prove it. “You need to cleanse your system and unblock those lungs.”
When she was done with him, she handed my father a printout listing some syrups and pills she offered for sale.
After my own eye scan, she told me I had an imbalance in my uterus.
Had I ever missed any periods? Had I taken a pregnancy test?
My father, who’d been examining a catalog filled with pricey herbs, suddenly looked up.
“I have no reason to take a pregnancy test,” I told her. “My husband and I, well, we’re not trying.”
My father opened his mouth to say something, but his words dissolved into a long coughing spell, which led her to add a few more recommended items to his list.
“Something’s going on with you,” she told me, as we left with two hundred dollars’ worth of vitamins, coenzymes, liquid oxygen, and natural cough suppressants for my father. “The eyes don’t lie.”
Dr. Padman’s office was a sad and desperate place. Everyone in his waiting room, mostly Caribbean, African, and Eastern European immigrants, seemed to be struggling for breath. Some, like my father, were barely managing on their own, while others dragged mobile oxygen tanks behind them.
My brother Bob, who taught global studies at a nearby high school, was, because of his location and the free afternoons his work schedule allowed, my father’s most frequent waiting room companion. After a few visits, however, he too began dreading that gray and dingy room, its stale and stuffy smells, its peeling beige paint and anti-smoking posters, because it was the one place where our father’s predicament was most unambiguous, where his future seemed most uncertain. At the same time, it was where Papa appeared most comfortable, where he could cough without being embarrassed, because others were coughing too, some even more vociferously. In the skeletal faces and winded voices around him, he could place himself on some kind of continuum, one where he was still coming out ahead.
A nurse asked my father to step on a scale soon after we arrived. This was the part of the visits he would come to dread most, for it offered proof that he was indeed shrinking. Before he became ill he had carried 170 pounds on his five-eleven frame. During that July 2004 visit he weighed 128 pounds.
When we stepped into his office, Dr. Padman quickly introduced himself. A short, bespectacled South Asian man with only a trace of an accent, he seemed, like my father and me, to have spent part of his life in a section of the world that still echoed in his voice. With the examining table and a full-size scale filling up the tiny room, there was space for only one seat across from his desk, where a computer screen was angled toward a barred window, away from the patient.
I stood behind my father’s chair and looked down at both him and the doctor, like a workplace inspector taking everything in while doing her best not to interfere.
“How are you doing, sir?” Dr. Padman asked.
“Not so good,” my father answered.
Throughout his illness, my father never told his doctors he was feeling “bad.” It was either “Not so good” or “Not so bad,” a literal translation of the Creole expression “Pa pi mal.”
“And how is the cough, sir?” Dr. Padman continued.
My father replied, “The same.”
I wondered whether Dr. Padman’s calling my father “sir” was an affectation, a point of effort in his bedside, or desk-side, manner or something he did naturally. Maybe he was one of those people who called everyone “sir,” especially those who were least likely to be addressed that way. Or maybe it was simply a way of not having to remember names.
Dr. Padman quickly scanned the computer screen, then pulled my father’s X-rays and CAT scan film out of a mustard yellow envelope. He held them up to the window light, then, glancing at the computer screen, asked my father, “Are you still on the codeine, sir?”
My father had stopped taking the codeine, which an emergency room physician had prescribed for him, because the codeine had caused him to fail the yearly drug test required by the Taxi and Limousine Commission for the renewal of his cabdriver’s license. He took advantage of Dr. Padman’s question to ask if Dr. Padman would write a letter for his Taxi and Limousine Commission appeal, stating that he was taking the codeine for legitimate medicinal purposes.
Dr. Padman nodded and made a note on a yellow pad. Then he picked up the phone and buzzed his assistant.
Edie was a skinny, perky Filipina who spoke every sentence at the top of her voice, as though it were being broadcast through a bullhorn at a pep rally.
“Good afternoon,” she bellowed, startling my father.
“Edie’s going to check your breathing, sir,” Dr. Padman told my father.
My father looked up at Edie, then back at the doctor with equal helplessness. He slowly pushed himself up by holding the back of the chair.
“We won’t be long,” Edie said, grabbing hold of one of my father’s elbows.
As my father disappeared from view, I slipped into the chair where he’d been sitting and tried to sneak a look at Dr. Padman’s computer, but the tilt of his screen was designed to give maximum view to the doctor and limited view to the patient.
“Edie is going to do a pulmonary function test,” he explained. “The test will require your father to blow into a tube so we can find out how much air is in the lungs.”
I imagined my father with this tube in his mouth, trying to fill it impossibly with air and failing over and over again. One did not have to be a pulmonologist to see that he couldn’t even blow out a small candle. He had no air to spare.
“I’m really worried about my father,” I said.
Perhaps thinking I was talking only about the test, he said, “Don’t worry. Edie will take good care of him.”
“In general,” I said. “I’m worried about his condition.”
“Your father has a very bad disease,” he said. “It’s called pulmonary fibrosis. You can look it up on the Internet. You’ll see it’s not very good.”
Suddenly it was as though we were discussing someone both of us barely knew. I almost expected to go home and look up the disease and find my father’s name listed under its many definitions and examples. With no better choices of words, deeds, or prayers, I resorted to a cliche, a common line from soap opera sickrooms.
“What’s his prognosis?” I asked.
“It depends on a lot of things,” he said, “but most people who are resistant to treatment live anywhere from six months to two years.”
My father’s body was resisting treatment. The codeine and prednisone he’d been prescribed by the emergency room physician were neither relieving his cough nor slowing down the gradually irreversible stiffening and scarring of his lungs.
“You should tell your loved ones about your father’s condition,” Dr. Padman said, as though this was the kind of information one could keep to oneself.
