The Russian Heart - NYTimes.com Perhaps because I'm still in my early 30s, I tend not to fully believe that the people closest to me are vulnerable to sickness and death. But in 2008, shortly after my parents moved from Russia to Brooklyn's Brighton Beach - a Russian neighborhood on the edge of the Atlantic - I began to have doubts that I would be celebrating Father's Day ever again. I started to notice that my dad was getting pale. His zest for car shows, roasted chicken and 3D movies remained, but when someone cracked a joke at dinner, instead of turning beet-red with laughter like my mom and me, he remained white as a burial shroud. Watching him laughing, yet unable to flush, I felt I was looking at a corpse in the making. My parents had tried to move to New York for years to live closer to me. They were fed up with phone calls and Skype and my infrequent visits to Petrozavodsk, my hometown near the Finnish border. They were also fed up with living on a meager government pension and with the "new" Russia that now belonged to the gangster and the oligarch. When they finally got here, my mom insisted they visit a family physician. My father kicked up a cloud of dust: "I'm 62, healthy, have always been healthy, will continue to be healthy, and have no use for doctors." But Mom went straight for the total knockout. "If you don't get a physical," she told him, "I'm getting back on the plane to Russia." He got the physical; he never stood a chance. So when he turned from pink, to pale, to ashen, I knew at least he had someone to call, and I told him to do it. He went in for an examination, and the doctor sent us straight out again - to an emergency room on Manhattan's Upper West Side. While I filled out the paperwork, two E.M.T."s wheeled past me a woman arched in pain, her face stretched over her skull like an ill-fitting mask. She pleaded with them to let her die. "Ma'am, we can't do that," one replied, pushing her stretcher toward the last unclaimed bed. I steeled myself for the night ahead. A nurse walked up to us and asked my father if he had any chest pains. "Yes," he replied. Shortness of breath? Dizziness? The nurse gave him a handful of pills. My father gulped them down. "So your parents like it here, in America?" the nurse asked me, and I translated the question for my mom. "Don't know," she replied in Russian. We're in Brighton Beach. We don't go to America. "Yes," I said to the nurse. We all smiled, my father raising two thumbs up. "Shouldn't be too long now," the nurse said. "We're happy to wait," I said. I was starving. Cranky. Terrified. Three hours later, the nurses took my father upstairs. Time crawled. At midnight, when the adrenaline squeezed my whole body into a cold knot, a vibrant Indian woman in green scrubs walked into the waiting room, holding up X-rays. "Hi, I'm the chief cardiologist," she said. Two of your father's arteries are 90 percent blocked. But this one," she flipped the X-ray over, "is 100 percent blocked. Your father has been functioning on roughly 10 percent of his heart's capacity. He almost died today. She pointed to the X-ray. But look at this. His heart created a new artery to feed blood into the other chamber. That's why he's still alive. His heart did what? I was dumbfounded. It made a new artery. Look. She thrust the X-ray into my hands. There, in my father's heart, an anfractuous line extended from the top left toward the bottom right. It was beautiful, this heart of ingenuity, of resilience, clinging onto life with all its fibers. The heart that lusted for joy yet remained entangled in melancholic chains of its own creation. The Russian heart. "You need to make a decision," the cardiologist said. It's either a triple bypass or angioplasty. No guarantee either one will work. What's angioplasty? We'll put stents in his arteries to help keep them open. Your father will have to take blood-thinning medication for the rest of his life. Aspirin, Plavix. And he needs to cut down his cholesterol. "Let's go with the angioplasty," I said. Mom nodded in agreement. So this was how it happened, that passage into adulthood, when a son became a father to his dad. The procedure took a few hours; my father spent that night in the hospital, and would have to return again in a few days. But for now, Mom and I picked him up and took a taxi back to Brighton Beach. While he rested in the bedroom, Mom whipped up a feast of pelmeni and stuffed peppers. Afterward, all I could do was crawl from the table to the couch to sloth off for a few hours. "Get this," my father said, plopping down on the couch next to me. Two Russians are at the beach. One says, "You know, since we live in America, we should learn English." Meanwhile, there's a man in the water, waving his hands frantically, screaming, "Help!" The two Russians ignore him, so the man drowns. And then what? Mom implored. My father looked at us with a deviant glint in his eyes. "So then the other guy says, "See, English didn't help him."" Whack! He smacked his knee and convulsed in a fit of laughter. Mom and I followed, unsure if we were laughing at the joke or at him. But Dad! I protested, once I caught my breath. It's not funny! "I know," he said, beet-red in the face, tears running down his cheeks. I just felt like laughing. Dmitry Iyudin, a senior at the New School, is working on a young adult novel.