- Home
- /
- Latest Voices
- /
- Page 101
Latest Voices
Assistance
I used to always walk in the woods
before I became crippled.
— from a dying woman
I respond to a ranch house at twilight. An old woman is dying from metastatic lung cancer, vomiting blood. In between episodes of dry heaving and spitting dark clots, she reaches her hand out, sometimes grabbing my arm, other times involuntarily seeking the sky. We both know what her family refuses to see: she will be dead in a few hours.
Destiny and the Socks
Canine Comfort
According to family legend, my mother took me for a walk in my stroller on one of those dog days of summer–high humidity, flopping flowers, lackadaisical leaves. I was happily singing along with the birds when a neighbor’s demonic dog rushed my stroller and tried to Eskimo-kiss me with its snout. I screamed, the dog howled, and thus began my lifelong fear of all furry, four-legged Fidos.
Four Floppy Ears
He was my first encounter with a comatose patient.
How does one communicate with an unconscious body? With tubes and wires and braces. He was fragile. He’d suffered a diffuse nerve injury and faced an unknown prognosis, yet his family was pleading for a hint of recovery as we were preparing to transfer him to a rehabilitation facility later that day.
He lay motionless on the stretcher while I awaited the arrival of transport staff to wheel him away.
Where’s My Cheeseburger?
Susceptible to Stroke?
I have met a lot of anxious people in my professional work teaching math to adults. Ever calm and patient, I would work with math-anxious students to help them manage the often-overwhelming anxiety they felt trying to make sense of a subject I loved, trying to help them feel more at ease taking tests. We’d talk about strategies to help them relax their minds and bodies so they could access all the knowledge I knew they had inside.
As for myself, feeling anxious wasn’t part of who I thought I was.
Contagious
My friend commiserated: No self awareness.
That night I had dinner with a
Time of Death: N/A
Fifteen years ago, my father suddenly fell ill. After a trip to the hospital, the initial diagnosis was bronchitis. But following three days of unrelenting malaise, my father returned to the hospital and was immediately admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. Two weeks later, he was dead.
Saved from Myself
My obsession started with Anna Mayfield, one of my labor patients. She had a normal labor, but the baby’s heart rate dropped precipitously in the delivery room.
When the baby was handed off to me, he was dusky, not crying and limp as a piece of cooked spaghetti. I pressed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, suctioned mucus from his stomach, rubbed his back, flicked the soles of his feet. He remained unresponsive.
Subscribe
Get the latest issue of Pulse delivered to your inbox, free.
