Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

when the little things add up

It began in early July with Mom’s quiet but steady voice, sharing her concerns with me about Dad. She was living the day-to-day beside him, while I only saw him every other weekend. At first, even I brushed it aside, convincing myself it was nothing. But two weeks ago, when Dad walked through my house, I saw it with my own eyes. Something was off. For more than a month, little changes had been creeping in, subtle but insistent. Dad dragged his foot when he walked, almost as if he was tripping on his feet. His steps were uneven in ways they had never been before. Sometimes he would reach for a wall or steady himself on a chair, like balance had become an unreliable friend. Out in the garden, picking strawberries, his legs would give way without warning, and he would fall into the dirt.

These things don’t sound terrible when you say it out loud, the kind of changes people dismiss with a shrug and a comment about age, but I knew better. You don’t live beside a man every day, watching him move and laugh without noticing when something feels different.

pushing for answers

At first, his doctors gently dismissed it, as is often the case when someone grows older, as if fragility is inevitable and deserves no further consideration. The VA has always been good to my dad, but the appointments they scheduled were weeks out. The urgency wasn’t quite there, and I began to get concerned. I sat down to put it on paper while Mom described everything that had been going on. We documented the shifts, noting when things started happening, and I wrote everything out. Essentially, I demanded, in the kindest way possible, that we have tests, scans, MRIs, and anything else to confirm what we already knew. Something was not right. And even then, I wrestled with doubt; was I being too pushy, too dramatic, too unwilling to let age simply explain it away?

the diagnosis that changed everything

Three days ago, the truth came crashing in. He was at a routine follow-up at the VA, my mom and dad expecting to be told they could head home, when instead a doctor walked into the room with a face that carried an air of urgency. They had run an MRI, and the results showed a brain bleed. No delay, no second opinion, no chance to take a breath; he was transferred immediately to the main hospital in town via an ambulance and all of the screaming lights to meet a neurosurgeon. Within hours, he had been through intake and was being prepped for emergency brain surgery.

forty-eight hours of fear

The next twenty-four hours stretched into something unrecognizable, a blur of fear and the terrifying math of odds that no one wants to calculate for the man who raised them. Time bent and blurred, turning minutes into hours. And yet, within two and a half hours of surgery, he was awake, smiling, asking for a steak as if he had simply come through a dental cleaning. That was when I knew he was still Dad, himself, still with us. Relief poured in, but nothing prepares you for how close you come to losing someone you love, or how fast it can all unravel.

why advocacy matters

The larger truth I cannot shake is this: advocacy matters. Not just for ourselves, though God knows I am standing in that place with my own surgery looming in less than two weeks, but for the ones we love. Had this been brushed off any longer, had we not pressed, written, and insisted, it could have been fatal. We might never have had answers. We might have just lost him. This man is the only father I have ever known, and the thought of losing him to a casual shrug or a missed test is unbearable.

love that refuses silence

We are taught to trust the system, to believe that someone will see what we see, but the truth is that no one knows the rhythms of our people or ourselves better than we do. We live beside them, we watch, we listen, we feel the subtle shifts that signal something more profound. That knowledge is not paranoia; it is love, and sometimes love has to raise its voice and demand to be heard. Dad is alive today because we refused to accept “it’s just age” as an answer. And as I walk into my own surgery, carrying my own fear, I am holding on to that same truth. Advocacy saves lives. It saved his. And differently, it is saving mine too.

the sacred duty to speak

And maybe that’s the lesson in all of this: the ordinary things we notice, the quiet insistence that something is wrong, the courage to put it into words and demand attention – these are the moments that change the story. Advocacy is not glamorous, but it is a sacred duty. It is the choice to believe what your heart knows and to fight for someone’s tomorrow. And sometimes, that fight is the only reason tomorrow even comes.

There is power in speaking up, and the reason I simply cannot stay quiet when something feels wrong.

As for Dad? He’s still in the hospital but they told us he might get to come home soon. (smile).