May 2013

How It Was When You Stopped Knowing Me

Susan Rooke

When I cannot help remembering, I recall
that the end of your memory arrived
in a Texas spring so wet it churned the rivers,
ripped white frame houses from the banks
and sent them rampaging on the currents
like Pamplona bulls turned loose into the streets.
There were bridges on those rising rivers, and
I cannot help remembering that I crossed them

driving south, looking down to see the sharp horns
of shingled eaves tossing, slinging muddy foam
in the floodwaters down below. I drove hours

just to get you, because you’d lost the knack
of getting anywhere yourself–a block away,
next door, downstairs–and so, when I cannot help
remembering how it was when you stopped
knowing me, I recall that I came for you to guide
you through the rushing streets of your newly
foreign, unfamiliar land, that metaphorical Pamplona,
not as just a native steering a tourist through
the crowd, but as if I’d been your child, as if you
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Return of the Hero

1 Comment / Stories / Peg Ackerman

Peg Ackerman

Blanched by anemia, Mary rested quietly in the hospital bed. Her pallor made her barely visible amid the bleached bed linens–she seemed a mere shock of white hair against the pillowcase.

Age ninety-three, she’d visited the hospital a half-dozen times in as many months, shuttling between nursing home and hospital as many elders unwittingly do in their last year of life. She may have preferred to stay put, but no one knew for sure: as a person with dementia, she was presumably unable to speak for herself.

I was a palliative-care nurse practitioner in the hospital. Until about two decades ago, whenever someone neared the end of life the details of care were discussed with his or her doctor; nowadays, that intimate discussion often takes place in-hospital, with a total stranger. For Mary, I was that stranger.

Hospitalized for severe anemia, she had been scheduled for a colonoscopy. But when she refused to drink the four-liter liquid prep, her doctor flipped her to me to evaluate her “goals of care.”

Goals of care–that’s our euphemism for how a person wants to die. We ask questions like, “Do you want your heart resuscitated if it stops?” or “Do you want

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On the Road

Leave a Comment / Stories / Josephine Ensign

Josephine Ensign

As a community health nurse, I work with homeless and street-involved teenagers. In almost thirty years of doing this work on both coasts, and in Thailand and Venezuela, I’ve gotten to know thousands of young people living on the margins of society.

I love working with them; they challenge me to see the world–and myself–in a broader way, one that opens up vistas of hope for positive change and a better future.

And I always find myself touched by their hopefulness and vulnerability. Their level of optimism varies depending on many factors: their socioeconomic background and level of education, their intelligence and social skills, their involvement with foster care, and factors such as the general level of chaos they experienced growing up, and whether or not they suffered childhood abuse. But no matter how bad their lives have been, these young people always seem to hold on to a sense of possibility.

Sometimes I talk to a homeless teen for ten minutes and feel convinced that he or she can make it out. But sometimes I’m wrong.

Take Will, for instance.

I met him in Seattle at a homeless-youth clinic where Will came for health care. He was

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During Lunch at Medical Center Hour Today

What to Say When You’re Terminal

Leave a Comment / Stories / Ellen Diamond

Ellen Diamond

For the past fifteen years, I have had an incurable form of leukemia.

Such diseases used to be called terminal illnesses, but we don’t hear that term as much anymore. With all the new drugs and treatments available, doctors have become more reluctant to refer to diseases they can’t cure yet as “terminal.”

In the years just after my diagnosis, when friends and family would ask what could be done for it, I used to say that nothing could be done, adding: “It’s terminal.”

I was trying to be honest, to say, “Come now, we must face this.” People’s reactions of shock and sadness, though, made me wish I’d put it some other way. But what other way?

My father, who’d died of the same form of leukemia at age forty-three, had never known what he had. It was a secret my mother kept from him and from my sister and me–and as with many such family secrets, each of us paid a high price. So I wanted to be all about honesty.

I continued to use those words, yet they never felt quite right. I began to sense that there was a

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

How It Was When You Stopped Knowing Me

Return of the Hero

On the Road

During Lunch at Medical Center Hour Today

What to Say When You’re Terminal

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

May 2013

How It Was When You Stopped Knowing Me

Return of the Hero

On the Road

During Lunch at Medical Center Hour Today

What to Say When You’re Terminal

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