8 May 2026
There are certain days in our lives that we remember because something wonderful happened. There are others that stay with us because something terrible happened. And then there are a very few days that seem to contain an entire lifetime within them—a beginning, a crisis, fear, helplessness, gratitude and, ultimately, a realisation that something inside you has changed forever.
For me, that day was 8 May 2026.
It began with the arrival of new life and came frighteningly close to ending with the loss of someone who had been a constant presence throughout mine.
At around 8 in the morning, I received a call telling me that my cousin’s water had broken. She was expected to deliver on 10 May, but the baby had decided not to wait. She was rushed to the maternity hospital, and I got up and immediately informed my parents. They left for the hospital without much hesitation. At that point, the morning carried the excitement and urgency of an impending birth. There was no reason to imagine that anything else was about to happen.
I went about my own morning as usual.
Then, around 10 a.m., my father called.
He told me he was in some kind of problem and asked me to come to the hospital. I was in a call with my Director and couldn’t simply drop everything at that exact moment. About half an hour later, my father called again. That was when I told my Director that I had to leave. My cousin had delivered a baby, I explained, and there was an issue with my father at the hospital.
Even then, I did not understand the seriousness of what was happening.
I didn’t take my car. I assumed my father had taken his, and since I imagined that we would eventually return home together, I took an auto-rickshaw instead. It was an ordinary decision made in an ordinary moment—one of those decisions that only acquire significance when you look back at them through the lens of what happened afterward.
The auto took about thirty minutes to reach the maternity hospital.
But when I arrived, I was told that my father was not there.
He had been taken to the emergency department at SMHS Hospital.
That was the first moment when I felt that something was seriously wrong.
I got the car keys from a cousin and headed towards SMHS. I remember the feeling of urgency, but I still hadn’t allowed myself to imagine the worst. Perhaps that is how the mind protects us. It gives us information in small portions because sometimes the whole truth is simply too frightening to process at once.
When I reached the hospital, however, there was no mistaking the gravity of the situation.
My father was lying on a bed in the triage area, with several people gathered around him. He looked weak and disoriented. That image is difficult for me to forget because it was so different from the image of him that I had carried in my head for years.
He was my father.
The person I had always associated with energy, movement and activity was suddenly lying there, vulnerable and dependent on the people around him.
I was told that he had suffered a heart attack.
The doctors took my consent and administered medication. For the next hour, we waited and watched. There is a strange quality to hospital waiting rooms. Time seems to slow down, but your mind moves impossibly fast. Every movement of a doctor attracts your attention. Every change in a monitor becomes meaningful. You begin reading expressions on people’s faces because you are desperate for information before anyone actually tells you anything.
After some time, the doctors said that he was becoming stable.
Those words gave us hope.
Around 1:15 p.m., a few relatives suggested that we should go to the mosque because it was Friday. I agreed. Sahar and my mother remained beside my father while we left.
It was such a small decision.
We were not leaving because we thought he was dying. Quite the opposite. We had been told that he was stabilising. We believed we could step away briefly, pray, and return.
I had barely left the hospital premises when my phone rang.
It was Sahar.
She told me that I needed to come back immediately because his condition had deteriorated.
I rushed back.
What I saw when I entered the emergency area is something I don’t think I will ever completely forget.
My father was losing his breath.
He was fading away in front of us.
There are moments when reality becomes almost impossible to comprehend. You can see what is happening, you can hear people shouting, you can see doctors moving around you, and yet some part of your mind keeps insisting that this cannot possibly be happening.
My tears came without any control.
I wasn’t trying to cry. I wasn’t thinking about crying. They simply came. I had no ability to stop them.
His pulse suddenly rose to around 200.
Then the monitor changed.
One of the lines went flat.
Then another.
And finally, his pulse disappeared.
The emergency cardiologist shouted that they were losing him.
Someone was told to bring the defibrillator—the machine that would deliver an electric shock to his heart. At the same time, the doctor began CPR, trying desperately to resuscitate him.
For around twenty seconds, she continued.
Nothing happened.
Then she took her hands off him.
I cannot properly describe what happened inside me at that moment.
I let out a cry.
It wasn’t the kind of crying that comes with sadness. It was something much more primitive—a sound that came from the fear of losing someone you had never seriously imagined living without.
I was looking at my father’s lifeless body.
Then they delivered the shock.
And suddenly, he came back.
The change was almost impossible to comprehend.
The same body that, seconds earlier, had appeared to have gone completely still began showing signs of life again. The doctors continued their efforts, and within the next minute, his vital signs began returning.
He was alive.
It felt like being given something back that I had already, for a few terrible seconds, believed was gone forever.
But there was no time to absorb what had happened.
The doctors immediately told us that he needed an angiography and had to be transferred to cardiology. Within minutes, he was placed in an ambulance. The siren came on, and we began the journey towards the super-speciality hospital.
That five-minute journey felt much longer.
The angiography revealed the reason behind the catastrophe.
There were two significant blockages.
One was approximately 99 percent blocked.
The other was around 50 percent.
The more critical blockage needed immediate intervention. The stent procedure took around two hours, and the doctors successfully treated the critical blockage.
The second blockage, they explained, could be managed medically.
But those words—“managed medically”—would become a significant part of our lives in the weeks and months that followed.
The man who had barely ever taken a paracetamol in his life was suddenly on a daily schedule of medicines.
His morning now begins with Pantop. Around 8 a.m., after breakfast, comes Telcure-H along with Brilinta and Aspirin. At lunchtime there is Mecosenz-D. Around 8 p.m., before dinner, he takes Revelol-AM. After dinner come Strovas 40 and the second dose of Brilinta.
Brilinta, or ticagrelor, is taken twice a day. Strovas 40 is taken once daily. Some medicines that were prescribed initially have since been discontinued, including Betaloc 25, Biso-T, Aldactone 25 and Daparyl, while the Nephrovin course was completed.
What looks on paper like a simple list of medicines has, for me, become a reminder of 8 May.
Every tablet has a story behind it.
Every dose exists because of that afternoon.
Every medication timing is a small reminder that things are different now.
And perhaps that is one of the strangest parts of what happened. Before 8 May, health was something I took for granted when it came to my father. He was active. He was outgoing. He was always ready to go somewhere, meet someone, do something or deal with whatever came his way. He was not the person I associated with hospitals, heart problems or eleven medicines spread across a day.
So even after he came home, my mind kept returning to the same question.
Why him?
I would look at him and think: Him?
Of all people, him?
It wasn’t that I believed my father was somehow immune to illness. I knew, rationally, that nobody is. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and confronting it personally.
We tend to think of our parents as constants.
They are there when we are children. They remain there when we grow up. We may become independent, build our own families and become responsible for our own lives, but somewhere underneath all of that is an assumption that our parents will continue to exist in the background of our lives.
We don’t consciously make that assumption.
We simply live as though it is true.
8 May broke that illusion for me.
Until that day, my father’s mortality was an abstract concept. After that day, it became something I had seen with my own eyes.
I had watched his pulse climb to around 200.
I had watched the monitors go flat.
I had watched a doctor perform CPR.
I had watched an electric shock being delivered to his chest.
And I had watched the monitors come alive again.
There is no way to experience something like that and remain exactly the same person afterward.
The four days and three nights that followed in the hospital were filled with a strange mixture of relief and anxiety. He had survived the immediate crisis, the stent had been placed, and the doctors were monitoring him. But I could not completely relax.
The crisis was over, but the fear remained.
I found myself paying attention to things I had never noticed before. His medicines. His meals. His reports. His blood pressure. His follow-ups. Which cardiologist we should consult. What each medicine was for. What could be stopped and what could not. Whether a particular symptom was ordinary or something that needed attention.
My role had subtly changed.
I was no longer simply his son watching his father grow older.
I had become one of the people responsible for making sure he remained well.
That realisation is difficult.
There is something deeply unsettling about seeing the roles between generations slowly shift. The person who once seemed capable of taking care of everything now needs someone to make sure the medicines are taken at the right time.
And yet there is also something profoundly humbling about it.
Because perhaps this is what family ultimately means.
The people who spent their lives looking after us eventually become the people we worry about.
We check on them.
We remind them.
We accompany them to appointments.
We learn the names of medicines we never thought we would need to know.
We begin measuring time not only in years, but in reports, follow-ups and doses.
I often think about how that day began.
At 8 a.m., the news was about a baby arriving two days early.
By 10 a.m., my father was asking me to come to the hospital.
By early afternoon, I was watching doctors fight to bring him back to life.
There is something almost cruel about the randomness of it.
Two lives were beginning their respective journeys that morning in completely different ways. One was entering the world while another was suddenly fighting to remain in it.
And I happened to be standing somewhere between the two.
Perhaps that is why 8 May feels so much larger than a medical event to me.
It was not simply the day my father had a heart attack.
It was the day I understood how quickly life can change.
It was the day I learned that “stable” does not always mean safe.
It was the day I discovered how helpless a son can feel while watching his father fight for his life.
It was also the day I understood what gratitude feels like at its most intense.
Because my father came back.
The monitor that had gone flat started showing life again. The doctors opened the critical blockage. They placed a stent. They stabilised him. He survived the hospital stay and eventually came home.
There is still a second blockage.
There are still medicines.
There are still cardiology appointments.
There is still the constant awareness that things are not exactly as they were before.
But he is here.
And after 8 May, “he is here” carries a weight that it never did before.
I don’t know whether the fear of that afternoon will ever completely disappear. Perhaps it shouldn’t.
Some experiences are meant to leave a mark.
I now know what it feels like to receive a phone call that changes the course of a day. I know what it feels like to run through a hospital because someone you love is suddenly deteriorating. I know what it sounds like when a doctor shouts that they are losing a patient. I know what it feels like to see a monitor go flat and to believe, even for a few seconds, that the person lying in front of you is gone.
And I know what it feels like when that same monitor comes back to life.
That is what I will remember most about 8 May.
Not only the fear.
Not only the heart attack.
Not only the 99 percent blockage, the stent, the hospital stay or the medicines.
I will remember that for a few terrible seconds, I thought I had lost my father.
And then, against everything those few seconds seemed to be telling me, he came back.
Some dates mark events.
Some dates mark endings.
And some dates remind you, with extraordinary force, just how precious an ordinary day really is.
For me, 8 May 2026 will always be the day I nearly lost my father—and the day I was given him back..
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