Past Medical History
Donald Stewart
My career in medicine began when I was three years old.
Holding tightly to my father’s hand at the end of a dark hospital corridor, I couldn’t keep up with the heavy, sibilant stream of conversation flowing between Daddy and Dr. Mashburn, the man who had delivered me, who had sewn up my chin after I’d slipped in the bathtub a month before and who was now explaining the details of Mommy’s condition. Something, I knew, was making her bad. Sometimes her arms and her back hurt so much she couldn’t even pick me up.
My attention slipped away from the confusing drone of grown-up words and fixed on a bright black-and-white picture shining down from a lighted box on the wall. The “x-array” film clearly showed a gleaming white shaft of bone (my mother’s clavicle, a word unknown to me at the time) with a perfectly round, dark spot in the middle. One day I would understand this spot to be a hole in my mother’s skeleton. Such x-ray findings were evidence of eosinophilic granuloma, a disease that causes white blood cells to multiply and clump together at various points in the body. This illness was the » Continue Reading.
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