To my former neuro-oncologist (separated by insurance):
Greetings, again.
What you said when I first became your patient, about the consequences in adult survivors of childhood cancer with secondary tumors, was spot on, and I’m now in palliative care.
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.
Never Read Your AVN* Read More »
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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