An early morning Zoom class, “Dealing with the Inner Critic,” to return my brain to a poetic rather than medical mode. I have several projects simmering, some raw, others partly cooked, but none completely finished, ready for consumption.
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T.S. Eliot was slightly off: I consider May, not April, the cruelest month.
May 8: A birthday, Maril’s. She died of pancreatic cancer—too soon after her brother, my step-father, died of the same disease.
May 10: A diagnosis—the date I learned I had pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia, two days before my 14th birthday.
Bradycardia (heart rate 41) one day, tachycardia (heart rate 168) the next, just sitting in bed, before … during … after a seizure. My epilepsy is refractory—resistant to treatment—and this incident scares me. But I hesitate to make an appointment, scared as well about the bill.
How to thank the on-call physician? Not on MyChart. My brain previously so flustered I couldn’t put a name to the voice; only by checking “Medications,” where he’d written a thorough note, could I make the link, but impossible to message directly.
“A dog, a cat, and a pig walk in…” Sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s actually the tale of my surgical attachment to animals.
A teenager with leukemia. Grateful for a ground floor hospital room with large windows, my dog just a pane away. Nose to snout, hand to paw, inpatient, outpatient.
“You’d better sit down,” says the neighbor of a friend, a voice I hardly recognize over the phone. On automatic pilot, I grab the nearest chair.
“Okay.”
“S. shot herself.”
“What?” Shock throws me off balance, even with four legs and a wooden seat under me.
“S. bought a gun and shot herself last night on the patio outside the kitchen, leaving a trail of notes for B. to find while he was out walking the dog.”
I can’t keep up with all this information.
You, an astrobiologist, fly up from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., to visit me, a sophomore in college, at Yale-New Haven Hospital. I’ve just had a new type of chest catheter inserted: a “port-a-cath,” a subcutaneous device to replace my Hickman catheter. It promises a reduced chance of infection. But you didn’t need to come all this way, for such a minor surgery.
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