Free Doctored by Sandeep Jauhar

to stay with my brother. My parents stayed with Rajiv whenever they visited New York, a deference they naturally extended to their greatest asset and biggest investment.
    On Sunday morning, after I had spent a long night helping Sonia with feeding and diaper changing, Rajiv phoned me in a panic. My father had been having episodes of numbness and tingling in his left arm (along with similar but milder symptoms on the right). Rajiv was worried they were transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), or ministrokes. He said he was taking my father to LIJ to be evaluated.
    â€œStroke?” I said dubiously. “With bilateral symptoms? Come on, what kind of nerve distribution causes bilateral—”
    â€œDon’t be academic about this!” Rajiv snapped, cutting me off. “Let’s let the experts figure out what’s going on.”
    He called me a couple of hours later. Caroline Davenport, the neurologist on call, had seen my father in the emergency room. Suspecting a TIA, she’d sent him for a CT scan of the brain, which was normal. Since early strokes don’t always manifest on a CT scan, she had ordered an MRI of the head and brain stem, which also revealed nothing unusual. Despite the normal studies, she had decided to admit my father for observation and started him on blood thinners.
    I jumped into my car and sped to the hospital. It was a calm and clear day, a stark contrast with the maelstrom that had been unleashed in my chest. Though I doubted anything was seriously wrong with my father—I’d seen him only a couple of days earlier, and he hadn’t mentioned any symptoms to me—I still felt afraid. Dad wasn’t supposed to get sick. It was the one thing as children we were told to fear the most. I raced across the George Washington Bridge. The Hudson River was shimmering like a pool of mercury. Near La Guardia Airport, I got stuck in a traffic jam, honking my horn in desperation to get it moving while airplanes drifted precariously low overhead. By the time I reached the hospital it was already past noon, two and a half hours after I had departed.
    I found my father in a semiprivate room on the seventh floor. His eyes were darting, and he had a strangely disconnected look, which I attributed to anxiety. Rajiv and my mother were there, too, sitting quietly, now looking bored. A medicated drip hanging on a pole was connected to my father’s arm. Rajiv informed me that Dad’s blood pressure was elevated, so doctors had given him lisinopril, the same drug that we had advised him to start several years earlier but that he had declined. We now took turns assailing him over how irresponsible he had been. He offered no defense.
    The reason my father had refused to take lisinopril (or any other drug Rajiv and I had suggested) was that he no longer trusted medicines to keep him well. Six years earlier, when I was in my final year of medical school, he had started having headaches that were probably triggered by job stress but that over the course of several months became chronic. Initially he took over-the-counter medications like Tylenol and aspirin, but with little relief. Then, at the urging of doctors, he moved on to prescription drugs: Flexeril, Fiorinal, Imitrex, amitriptyline, Paxil, and finally, prednisone. During that period he was seen by an array of specialists: three internists, two neurologists, two rheumatologists, an anesthesiologist, and an ophthalmologist. No one could tell him what was wrong. Then one day, totally fed up, my father stopped all his medications. Two weeks later, his headaches were gone.
    â€œIt was the medicine that was causing the headaches,” he concluded incredulously (and probably correctly). And though he’d grown up in a culture in which doctors commanded tremendous respect, he’d been loath to listen to physicians ever since.
    The following day in the hospital, my father got an echocardiogram to see if there was a blood clot in his