Vital
Everyone is nice to me. First night
through morphine I hear nurses saying
they’ll keep me on the surgical floor,
refuse to send me to the cancer unit.
They know I’m healthy, rich with lifeblood–
why view the damage this disease could do?
April 2025
Many Shades of Different
“Stage IV cancer at age twenty-one made me different from my peers…”
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When Dads Fail
My youngest son Camron, was only ten years old—and he was feeling bereft, because he’d lost all connection to his friends. His iPad was on the fritz, less than a year after we’d purchased it.
Camron had yet to dive into the electronic age as his classmates had done. Mostly he played outside with his dogs and cats, fed and chased his goats and bounced on the trampoline with his brother. But during the one hour per day when we permitted him to play games online with his friends, he grinned from ear to ear and laughed nonstop.
Now his iPad had quit working.
Boys or girls?
Like many parents, I love to talk about my children. A conversation with someone to whom I’m newly introduced often begins with “Do you have children?” (Yes.) “How many?” (Two.) Then the natural and understandable follow-up question is usually “Boys or girls?”
Usually, I revel in the possibilities inherent in meeting someone new. However, at such moments, I pause and protest silently. Ugh! This is a question one should never ask someone you’re just meeting.
What I Know By Heart
Knowing things by heart usually means having them memorized, at your fingertips. Song lyrics, birthdays, phone numbers, the poem I learned in second grade.
These days, for me, knowing by heart is a different exercise. What I know by rote, what I remember, are the dosages of medications, their side effects, and illnesses that can mimic or interact with various behavioral conditions. Hypothyroidism can look like depression; palpitations aren’t always panic attacks. I have medical knowledge, learned in school and accumulated over many years.
What I know by heart, though, is different.
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Nontraditional
A thirty-six-year-old mom with four children and four jobs embarks on a career in nursing…
Collecting Stories
My love for collecting stories was seeded in middle school with the sounds of crinkling sleeping bags, the salt of instant ramen brine, and the ache of raw conversations digging deep past my bedtime. Those nights, with the other pimply, Asian American peers at church, we peeled back our tight facades, revealing layers of vulnerability and hurt intermingled with courage and integrity, imprinting moments of connection felt so real to me that I became hooked recreating them, especially with individuals not so similar to myself.
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Physical Therapy
This morning a volcano
turned back into a neck,
simply a neck.
Decades after a tiny
muscle knot had wandered
or was pushed up
under the skull’s tight base,
this morning it emerged,
brimming with thanks.
