By Elaine Cohen

I remember as a child when Dad would come home from work, place his briefcase down, drop his suit pants and take a syringe out and inject a needle into his thigh. This happened everyday.

“I’m a diabetic, and that’s just what we do, no big deal,” he would say.

One day, when I was in high school, he came home very confused. I laughed at his dazed and lightheaded demeanor. He said he had a hard time finding the apartment, that he had gotten lost. Mom and I stared at each other.

What was wrong with him?

She gave him some orange juice; he drank it and perked back up to normal. It was the first time I’d seen a low sugar attack. Episodes like this occurred fairly often and we’d give him juice and he would seem better. It became a bigger deal when my Mom had to start calling the EMT to revive him from near comatose states. This was very frightening and we begged him to be more careful with his insil*n.

Years later, on a bitter cold autumn night, my Dad called and left me message that he was at New York Hospital. His voice was groggy on my answering machine. I imagined he had a low sugar attack and was recovering in an emergency room. I called the hospital but there was no record of him.

Where was he? Why couldn’t I find him? Was he okay?

Then I tried NY Presbyterian Hospital, thinking he may have made a mistake when telling me the hospital. No, he wasn’t there either. Then, franticly, I tried NYU Hospital. He was there. Thank goodness, I had found him. But it was the middle of the night and the nurse told me I couldn’t visit. I barely slept, got up early, jumped in a cab and searched for him at the NYU Medical Center.

I found him there, awkwardly lying in a hospital bed, still confused and speaking with a doctor. He was slurring his words and had two black eyes. He looked almost like a homeless man – disheveled and unkempt. When he saw me, something clicked.

“My daughter,” he slurred with his New York accent.

The doctor told me they thought he’d experienced a mild stroke. I wanted to interrupt and tell the doctors my Dad didn’t have control of his sugars -- that he often took too much insil*n and experienced low sugar attacks. Maybe it was a stroke but he was losing control of his Diabetes. I spent the day there with him, holding his hand and wishing I could erase his disease. Ironically, that day was the anniversary of his wedding with my Mom. It would’ve been 23 years ago, but since they divorced, I was now his only close family.

A few days later he was released. We slowly walked out of the hospital, arm and arm, and got on the uptown bus to his apartment.

“We made it home, Dad,” I said.

“Good, doll, good.”

He still looked disheveled, and it hurt me to see that. He was my big, safe, protector, he was my beautiful strong Dad and now he was injured and in need of protecting.

For the next few months, I stayed with him a lot. I helped with his walking, his speech, his balance, and his strength. We did leg exercises together and I played the coach. We walked to the market to get his foods and to the pharmacy to get his medications. I cut melon for him and made lunches and dinners. We watched sports and the news and at times laughed, our big belly laughs together. I often stretched out on his sofa as he lounged on his recliner. I even begged him to buy a new television, to move to a better building closer to my place downtown. He needed better, he deserved better. His speech improved. His balance and gait strengthened.

“We are a team, Dad, a team.”

“Yes we are, doll.”

My Dad died at the very end of that year. He died in his apartment alone. I was crushed. I lost my emotional balance and strength for over a year. I felt I lost my protector forever.

More recently, I realized my Dad is not gone. I began to hear him in my speech, in my intonation. He was in me, a part of me, and I, a part of him.

I’m grateful for those months when I was his caregiver. Although it was terribly sad to see him so wounded; he was still my big-deal Dad, my strong and loving bear. We shared our love deeply through those days. I held his hand so many times and made an effort to feel his warmth and listen to his voice. I hugged his broad swimming shoulders and I kissed his big cheeks with great force, a force that was meant to express how much I loved him, how much we were on the same team, how much I was thankful that he was my Dad.