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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Esther Pottoore

All Rashed Out

What will tomorrow bring? This is the theme running in my head today as I zip in and out of patients’ rooms: listening, comforting, joking. And, just trying to get through the day.

They aren’t the only ones who are sick. I am still rashed out on my face and neck from one month ago.

Post-COVID, Round 3. A rash. Intense itching. Angioedema (swelling). Shortness of breath. My allergist and dermatologist are scratching their heads, trying to figure this out.

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Close to You

Her breath rasped, heavy, traveling all the way from an ICU in India to my ear pressed to the phone in Yonkers, New York. My mom’s best friend, her cousin, was dying far away from me. She had been like a mom to me.

Her sister had put the phone to her ear so that I could speak to her. She was unconscious for the most part, her body ravaged with cancer, her systems shutting down, one by one.

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Why Won’t You Ask Me, Too?

The Brooklyn Bridge and the water running beneath it shimmered in the evening sunlight as I gazed out the window of my  Pace University classroom. Class had just gotten over, and my classmates were making plans to go out for a drink and unwind. Snippets of conversation reached my ears as I gathered up my books and unplugged my computer.

“What about Esther? Shall we ask her?”

“Oh, no! She is Catholic, Indian, and married. She wouldn’t come!”

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How Did He Just Wake Up?

I hung up the phone in shock. I never felt so helpless.

My brother was lying in a deep coma in a Bronx hospital, and none of his nine siblings were in America. My parents were dead, and the closest relative was my mom’s brother who lived in Canada. He had already booked a flight to New York for the same night.

Sitting in a village in Saudi Arabia, where I worked as a community health nurse, I cried and prayed.

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