The "F" Word

Getting back to the scar on Dad's forehead...

The umbilical cord became somehow attached to his forehead while he was in the womb. When he came out, there was a surgical procedure involved that left a sizable mound of soft tissue that grew with age. It was reportedly quite grotesque, and caused concern that it might even be malignant. He had surgery to remove it when he was a preteen, and that led to the peanut-sized bump and scar that we were familiar with. He eventually got even the peanut smoothed out in his 60's when he was recommended a laser treatment by his doctor. I doubt if that was a particularly painful procedure, but I'm willing to bet the earlier one was.

My father’s life was a series of one pain after another. He told me that he suffered from migraines even as a kid. He described it as like having a headband that squeezed around his head, much like the legend of Songokuu, the Monkey King. I imagine how debilitating a headache is for me, and then he would tell me there was not one day in his life when he didn't have a headache. I suspected that his skull was too small for his brain (and as macabre as it may seem, I had hoped to visibly confirm that when we went through his ashes, but I couldn't tell). Other than that, however, he seems to have enjoyed good health and physical fitness in his youth. He was a gymnast in his high teens, excelling in the still rings. But as soon as it became legal for him at 20 years old, he started smoking cigarettes, as was widespread and fashionable at the time. The habit would continue for 30-odd years, reaching up to three packs a day with his Kents. My mother noted that we sons were baptized by his cigarette smoke.

When I was about eight years old, and the family was living in Japan, Dad had to undergo surgery to fix an ingrown toenail. Nowadays, it wouldn’t be a big deal anywhere, but in Japan in the late 1970’s, the procedure still must not have been widely known even at a relatively advanced medical facility. Only his foot was numbed. Dad was able to watch the procedure (why he would have wanted to, I'm not sure). The operation took four hours, near the end of which the local anesthesia had started to wear off.

The ingrown toenail made him walk with a limp, which may have somewhat contributed to permanent lower back pain. But in the mid-1980’s, he began experiencing a different kind of pain in his lower back and thighs. He would literally jump out of his seat as if struck by a bolt of lightning. He described the pain as “like a dull knife cutting a jagged wound” which in many instances attacked him in his privates. When there wasn’t pain, there was cold numbness. Headaches remained a constant, worse on some days than others. All of this led to sleep deprivation, which, in a vicious cycle, made the symptoms worse.

He sought the counsel of all types of doctors and masseuses based in both Eastern and Western medicines. An extreme acupuncturist of sorts would repeatedly draw round patches of blood from his back; my father would go back to him before the scabs healed. Some pursuits led him to dubious characters - one offered him a supposedly energized potion which my father was told to rub in a circle around his navel. I don’t blame him for not going to back to that quack.

What was amazing is that not one of even the more legitimate treatments helped. There was only one time he vividly remembered when he received a huge injection near where the spine meets the pelvis - during which he says he screamed like a banshee - but it cleared up his pain. "This is it!" he thought. He felt a sense of freedom he hadn’t felt in years, and enjoyed it for the rest of the day. But the dull pain was back the next morning.

The trouble was that none of the doctors at the time could detect any physiological cause for pain. Some thought perhaps the pain was all imagined, and even recommended psychiatric help. It would be a few more years of misdiagnoses and tests before he was diagnosed as having fibromyalgia. The name of the disease was not widely known then as it is now, especially recently when Lady Gaga made it known that she suffers from it.

By that time, he was forced to make several lifestyle changes. For one, he stopped smoking, cold turkey, made possible only by having that iron will only men born in a certain era were seemingly able to have. Of greater importance, he had to take some time off work to try to recover from his illness. Once he realized its permanency, however, he started working on his own from home and became a one-man corporation as a business consultant, leaving Yamaha, the company for which by then he had worked for more than 30 years. He once explained his decision to me this way: He had worked for Yamaha with the sense that he was always doing more for the company than the company was doing for him, that the company was indebted to him - until the last few years since he had gotten sick, when he was beginning to feel indebted to the company, and his pride wouldn't allow him to continue to work that way. Leaving the company due to illness did not only finalize the separation; it also meant that he was staying in the United States of his own volition. Although he continued to work with Yamaha's local subsidiaries as a consultant, he was no longer the typical "salary man" that dedicates his whole working life to one company. This decision was a big deal.

Moreover, he was now free to pursue a passion and lifelong dream - to become an author. He had a deep love for books of all kinds, his collection easily surpassing a large library aisle or two. Drawing from his decades of experience in international business, and constantly staying on top of world affairs, he began writing magazine articles and newsletters for his clients, but it was not long before he started on his first book. But that probably deserves a separate entry.

I still want to write about the other samurai scar, the "C" word, and the two gaping holes in his torso. And none of those was what killed him in the end.