When It Hits Home

It was nighttime here in the United States when my phone rang. On the other end was my mom, calling from Vietnam. My dad had gone to the hospital that morning for persistent headaches, and the doctors had just delivered the results: there was bleeding on the left side of his brain. They recommended surgery as soon as possible. If he waited too long, he could lose consciousness.

I sat there, numb. Thousands of miles away from my family, I didn’t know what to do.

Let me back up a little. About two months ago, my dad, who is turning 70 this year, mentioned that he couldn’t see well with his left eye. He went to see an eye doctor, who found that the eye was bleeding. He was treated and given medication, but things weren’t improving. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the eye bleeding was an early warning sign of what was happening in his brain. Then, about four weeks ago, the headaches started. They were constant and wouldn’t go away. That’s when he decided to go to the hospital for a closer look.

The brain scan revealed the bleeding. The neurosurgeon explained that blood had accumulated inside his skull, putting pressure on his brain. The procedure would involve drilling a small hole, known as a burr hole, to allow the blood to drain out. My dad agreed to do the surgery the next day. It took two days for the blood to fully drain, and three days after surgery, he was cleared to go home.

My dad tried to think back to whether he had fallen or hit his head at some point, but he couldn’t recall anything. The doctor explained that there could be many causes. One common cause in elderly patients is brain shrinkage. As we age, the brain naturally reduces in size, which stretches the bridging veins around it and makes them more vulnerable to tearing and bleeding. It’s something that can happen without any obvious injury. The doctor also explained that the impact on a patient depends on where the bleeding occurs. If it affects the area of the brain responsible for speech, the patient may have difficulty speaking. If it affects the area responsible for movement, the patient may struggle to move. In many cases, it weakens one side of the body. We were fortunate that my dad came through without any of these complications.

Here’s something that made this experience even more layered for me. In Vietnamese culture, and really across much of my parents’ generation, regular health checkups are not common. Many people avoid going to the hospital unless something feels seriously wrong, partly because of the cost, and partly because of the mindset that if you feel fine, you are fine. My dad’s first reaction wasn’t fear about the diagnosis. It was frustration. Why was this happening? Why did it have to cost so much? That’s just how his generation thinks. But this experience reinforced something I’ve come to believe deeply: early detection matters. I told my dad that it was a good thing we caught it when we did. Things could have been much worse.

Being so far from home during all of this was one of the hardest parts. I’m currently in the U.S. working under OPT as an international student, and my entire family is in Vietnam. After that first phone call, I sat alone in my apartment and did the only thing I could think of. I started Googling. I read article after article about brain bleeds, causes, treatment options, and recovery timelines. Slowly, the more I understood, the more I could breathe. I learned that the condition, likely a subdural hematoma, is treatable, and that the procedure my dad would undergo has a strong track record of success.

From that point on, I checked in with my mom every single day. She kept me updated on everything the doctors told her, and I shared what I had learned from my research. It became our way of processing it together, her on the ground, me from afar. When she told me what the doctors explained, I could fill in context from what I’d read. When I found information about brain shrinkage being a common cause in elderly patients, it helped ease some of her worry about what had gone wrong. We became each other’s support system across the distance.

I had even started looking at flights home, just in case things took a turn. Thankfully, my dad’s recovery was steady, though not instant. The first week after surgery, he was tired and needed a lot of rest. Gradually, his energy returned. Day by day, he got better. And today, three weeks after surgery, he’s back to walking, eating, and talking like his usual self. We’re staying on top of follow-up appointments to make sure things continue in the right direction. That alone felt like the best news our family could have asked for.

This experience changed something in me, not just as a son, but as a professional. At Moberg Analytics, we build software that helps clinicians monitor and care for patients with brain injuries. My dad’s case, while likely non-traumatic in origin, reminded me that brain injuries of all kinds affect real families in deeply personal ways. I have always understood, intellectually, that our work is important. I’ve always approached my role with a sense of responsibility, focusing on the reliability of our systems because I know that even a small mistake in our software could significantly affect a patient’s care. That belief hasn’t changed.

But what has changed is that I now feel it in a way I never did before. Before this experience, the patients our technology serves were abstract. Names on screens, data points in a system. Now, when I think about those patients, I see my dad. I think about families like mine, sitting thousands of miles away or right there in the hospital, waiting for answers and hoping for the best. I think about the doctors and nurses relying on tools like ours to make the right call at the right moment. When a nurse is monitoring a patient at 3 AM and needs to trust that the data on the screen is accurate, that is the standard I hold myself to. The work is no longer just important. It’s personal.

If there’s one thing I’d like you to take away from this story, it’s this: don’t wait. Encourage the people you love to get regular checkups, even when they feel fine. Pay attention to the small symptoms, the headaches that won’t go away, the vision that doesn’t seem quite right. And take a moment to appreciate the people around you, because family is the most important thing we have.

My dad is doing well, and for that, I’m deeply grateful. This experience reminded me why I do what I do, and it gave me a deeper sense of purpose that I’ll carry with me in every line of code I write and every system I help build.