As I sat down for my visit with dad, I turned on my cell phone’s voice recorder. He did not notice. I did not want him to know that I was doing it because I did not want him to realize that I was starting to treat every conversation we had as if it might be our last. I did not want to miss another opportunity to tape a good conversation because last time I had not and he had told a pretty good story from his childhood. About a minute later, though, I turned it off, again unnoticed. We had started arguing over his reluctance to consider another treatment possibility: colchicine. Normally used for gout, it seemed pretty benign to me and had been used in patients with pulmonary fibrosis.