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

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

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Lori Jakiela

A Family History of X

Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my doctor, Dr. Thompson, who looks like the comedian Norm MacDonald and tells smart-ass jokes and likes to draw stick-figure breasts on a whiteboard to show surgical options, asked, “Do you have a family history of breast cancer?”

He had already drawn a series of disembodied breasts before he asked this. The breasts were squared off, with Lego nipples—nothing Victoria’s Secret-ish, nothing human.

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Hope Is the Thing With Feathers

When my son Locklin was a month old, he became very sick. He started throwing up and kept throwing up and ended up in the hospital.

The hospital ID band on my son’s wrist fit on my ring finger. I could cradle my son’s whole body in my hands.

The oxygen meter clamped to his finger was the size of a paper clip. It glowed red and blue, the colors of emergency, like tiny police lights flashing against bleached hospital sheets.

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