The Call to my Father

"You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity."

- Greek Philosopher Epicures

I've often told people that the call I had to place to my father the night I was diagnosed was the hardest moment of my life - even harder than listening to the doctor tell me I had cancer. Tears were already streaming down my face as I took out my cellphone in the hospital lobby and dialed the number, wondering how and what I would say. My brother and I represent my parents' dreams in so many ways, and I had to call and take that away from them. It was Thursday night in Hong Kong, meaning it was early Friday morning back home in Los Angeles.

There's really no good way to tell someone you have cancer, especially in my situation where the spreading was already so severe, so I just told him I had bad news, and I let it all out. He had known I was going to be seeing the doctor that night because I had called and told him earlier, but nobody was expecting this. I cried. He cried. Everyone cried.

As you can imagine, my parents and brother had to fly out to Hong Kong to be with me to provide support, as well as help me make important medical decisions. But given that this was so last minute, how could they get there right away?

This is where the story gets interesting. Now in my first post, I said one of my goals was to present instances where things played out in ways that I feel were more than just coincidental. Where the hand of God was working in my life. This is going to be my first example of one of those instances.

Several months before that fateful Thursday night of March 22nd, my parents and brother had decided they were going to come visit me for a week in Hong Kong. They all checked their schedules, found a week that worked, and booked their tickets. Their arrival date: March 23rd! That's right, two months before I was diagnosed, before I was feeling any symptoms at al, they booked tickets to arrive in Hong Kong exactly one day after I was diagnosed. If they did not have those tickets booked, who knows when they would have gotten a flight out, and who knows how expensive it would have been to book last-minute? I consider that to be a miracle.

As you can imagine, that first week was very difficult for us, but being together helped us cope with the challenge that lied ahead. I thank God every night for arranging things for us in that way and allowing us to be together immediately. As far as the call to my father, despite how sick I've become from treatments and how much pain surgeries have caused, that 15-minute phone call will always stand out as the most difficult thing I've ever had to do. But you know what they say about difficult times (see above).

When I think back to that night and that call, I realize now that going through those challenging moments helped me build courage and confidence to overcome the obstacles I faced later on. I learned that as bad as it felt to make that call, and as hard as its been to go through some of these other treatments, something positive will always come out of it, and that positive development is where your focus needs to be.