Can I just say that my timing has always been….ironic? No less than three hours after I posted my last entry on worrying about my father’s health and the general nuttiness that consumes my mind, my phone rang.

“Your father’s [thallium stress] test went badly. The artery they stented in August is 100% blocked again and he’s being admitted,” my mother said.

Cue pit falling in stomach and tears welling in eyes. Not again.

Thus began several days of waiting, waiting to see if he would need a triple bypass surgery or if they could re-stent his major artery and leave the other four blockages alone for now. Either way, he’d need the dreaded dye for the catheterization, and his one little kidney still hadn’t recovered from August’s trauma.

Are you freakin’ kidding me? First of all, the man had done everything right: his cholesterol was the lowest it had ever been, he exercised regularly, faithfully took all his meds and statins, even dropped down to a four-day work week since the August scare. All that, and we were told that 95% of the time, stents lasted a lifetime. Of course the man with one kidney and a billion other medical problems was in the 5% of patients whose stents failed within months.

Secondly, what are the chances that the very day I write a post that talks about his health and my tendency to be a little overbearing and obsessive about it he gets this news?

In high school, after eight months of rehab from ankle surgery I made the JV basketball team (and yes, there were in fact cuts!). The day before my first game, I caught the ball awkwardly and because my bones are like twigs, I broke my hand. End of season. In grad school, shortly after I finally recovered from the one-two punch of whooping cough and viral pneumonia, my adrenal system failed. All this happened just as I was settling into the weekend job I adored at the Devon Nicole House at Children’s Hospital—and these are just the first instances to pop into my head.

My father’s timing is even more ridiculous. I could write pages about it, so I’ll just focus on recent events. In August, he got chest pains just after the ferry departed from Hyannis to Martha’s Vineyard, making for a long, harrowing ride. Last week, he felt short of breath and tired again, just as he was about to get on a plane and fly to DC and then Florida for conferences he’d looked forward to all year, events he was leading and presentations he’d labored over. Instead of going to the airport, he went to his doctor.

But there is a first time for everything, and my father’s catheterization Tuesday went better than best case scenario. I can’t even believe I just wrote that in conjunction with him. Better. Than. Best. Case. Scenario. They didn’t need to do the triple bypass, and they used so little dye during the cath itself they could re-stent it then and there, something no one thought they’d be able to do.

Feels too good to be true, but as each day goes by, we’re believing it more and more and we’re inspired by it.

During the long days in the hospital this week, I thought a lot about what I’d write here. I kept coming back to my last post and how my worries and actual events collided like that. It was tempting to bemoan our collective timing yet again, but something stopped me. My father was alive, and a lot of steps went into that process.

He was a ticking time bomb for months, walking around with a major artery 100% blocked and not realizing his stent failed. He was about to fly all over the country. What if he’d had another heart attack and this time it was on the plane? Or in a hospital far away where no one understood his beyond complex medical history? What if he hadn’t called his doctor exactly when he did and hadn’t been able to squeeze in the stress test?

His timing was pitch-perfect.

The more I think about all the near-misses, the plans gone awry and the events missed at the last second, I realize just how much timing impacts my life, our lives. Illness is never convenient and disappointments are frequent, but we’ve made it this far. I wouldn’t change our timing by one second.

“If I stopped and worried about everything that’s wrong with me, all the possible complications and outcomes, I’d never make it through the day. So I don’t. For better or worse, I just push through it,” my father said recently.

For the record, the man is a walking catastrophe: he’s diabetic, he’s lost a kidney to cancer, he’s had a heart attack and stents implanted. Oh, and he has a really rare connective tissue disease (polymyositis). So it really would take him all day to dwell on what ails him if he were so inclined.

“I know you know what I mean, Laurie,” he said.

Of course I knew what he meant, because I follow the same rules. This is not to say I don’t think about my health in the same way he has to on a daily basis, but thinking and worrying are two very different things.

He thinks about what he eats and thinks about his insulin. He thinks about how much exercise he needs to fit in and thinks about when to take his medication, but these types of thoughts are more rote procedure than anything particularly emotional or intellectual. I think about what time my chest PT is when I’m making plans, I think about taking certain meds on an empty stomach and others after I’ve eaten, and I think about what I’m buying at the grocery store in case I can’t find a parking spot and have to carry the bags too far. Nowhere in these deliberations does worry play a role.

Now, I’ve already admitted that I am somewhat of a control freak, something that bears mention in this conversation. I fully admit to being obsessive about certain parts of my life: making the bed, de-cluttering the coffee table, listening to certain music when I am writing, doing exercises at the gym in a particular order, etc. (Are you scared yet?)

I don’t obsess or worry about my health like that, though. Sure, I have moments where I’m genuinely scared or I wonder what it will be like 10, 20, or 30 years from now. Who doesn’t? But day to day, I don’t worry. I just do what I need to do and live my life, accommodating illness when I have to and defying it whenever possible.

But here’s the kicker: I worry about my father’s health. A lot. More than we each worry about our own combined. I inquire about his liver function often since the chemotherapy he takes is hard on the liver. I always ask for his latest cholesterol readings. I feel like there are so many moving parts involved in keeping him healthy (ish) and alive and I fear someone will drop one of them. I stress over his kidney function results, and spiral into a chain of what-if’s: Diabetes stresses the kidneys. He’s had it for over twenty years and he only has one kidney to begin with. The dye he needs for his heart catheterizations, angioplasties, and stents also stresses the kidneys, and he’s needed two rounds of the dye lately. What if he needs a transplant? Would he even be eligible, given his other serious conditions? Would his body be able to stand it if we found him a kidney?

“You can have one of my kidneys. If I’m a match, it’s yours. In a heartbeat,” I’ve told several times. Usually these offers of organs have no sequitor, and I get a lot of strange looks.

He always tells me not to worry so much, assures me that he is okay. But every now and then, he admits to the reality of his situation, and that actually reassures me. There is such a fine line between pushing along and getting through each day and plain old denial, and while I completely relate to his desire to just move forward and not focus on what’s wrong, I also think it’s important to acknowledge the long-term consequences…not enough to be dominated by them, but just enough to take them into consideration in the present, like when he’s trying to balance his blood sugars or trying to squeeze in exercise.

In the end, I think this goes back to my need for control. I take my meds, I follow my regimen, and though in the end I can’t always control what my body does, I feel better knowing at least I have all the moving parts accounted for. With my father, control of his health is one more step removed from me, and because I care about him so much, I want to be the one to keep it all together.

I’ve promised him I won’t worry quite so much, but I’m not sure he really believes this will happen. After all, as my father, he faces the same challenge in terms of worrying about me no matter how much I assure him I am fine…so I guess we both need to follow each other’s advice.