Prognosis
Small birds teeter
on the wires by the feedstore.
Crows scatter broken seedpods
beneath the streetlight.
Flowering weeds crowd the dusty sidewalk,
sickly yellow or red as blood.
March More Voices: The Biopsy
Dear Readers,
My dear, departed prostate was the cause–and the victim–of several biopsies.
Before the first one, I consulted with friends and family members. Turns out that a surprising number of men over fifty have had prostate biopsies–who knew? (Men don’t talk about this much.)
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A Puzzling Impulse
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
My mother has always advised me that it is good to be “different.” She herself, growing up, wanted to be different in both her personality and her fashion. But her wish to be unique is not something I’ve inherited.
Beginning in elementary school, the last thing I wanted was to be different from my school friends—in fact, I wanted to be them. This made things difficult, as I was the only brown person in my primarily white friend group.
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Committed to My Dad’s Comfort
When the phone rang at 4:30 a.m., my heart raced, expecting bad news from dad’s assisted-care facility. Instead, I heard the stammer and slow, almost indecipherable words of my father, “Rozzie, I’m so cold. Can you come and help me?”
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The Icy-Cold Patient at the Curb
One Friday night, a petite African-American woman approached the ER triage desk.
Voice quivering, “You gotta come get my brother.”
“What’s . . .?” But she’d walked away. I followed her outside with a wheelchair, and she pointed to a blue VW bug.
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A Time to Die?
I’ve always liked this hospital. It’s small, just two stories, with natural light flooding through the rain-cleansed windows.
My patient Ruby is on the ground-level medical ward. The ward’s Maori name, Muiriwai, means “confluent point of two streams.” Each ward has a Maori name and four beds. There are no private rooms in this public hospital.
Ruby is lucky to have a bed near the window.
COVID in 2024
I still remember the days of peak pandemic when everyone was stocking up on masks, toilet paper and even hand sanitizer. Back then, all patients wore masks, physicians gowned up, and loved ones couldn’t see their family members in the hospital. So many things have changed, with more patients being vaccinated, visiting hours loosened, and rarely do I reach for an N95. Even if I do reach for N95s, I can throw them away after one use without worrying that the hospital will run out of supplies.
Being Different: My Struggle and My Motivation
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
When I was in elementary school, I was bullied by my peers into believing that being different was bad.
I grew up thinking that speaking my mind was undesirable if my thoughts didn’t mirror those of others. To my peers, liking the “strange” foods of my parents’ Haitian cuisine, such as tripe or oxtail, was weird. I wore my older brothers’ hand-me-downs, which led to incessant teasing at school.
Although I grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts—a mostly Black, Haitian and Cape Verdean town—much of this negativity came from kids who looked like me.
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The Greatest Health Care System in the World
One might reasonably assume that diabetes testing supplies could be simply obtained. Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) eliminates fingersticks and enables more precise knowledge of sugar levels. Recently insurance denied coverage of CGM supplies for a patient I see. My patient’s blood sugars were higher than last year. My patient was upset about their elevated blood sugars AND their lack of glucose monitoring supplies. I pressed the pharmacy to learn the reason for the denial. Insurance would not cover CGM because the patient’s diabetes control had worsened, which indicated that the CGM did not help lower their blood sugars.
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My Invisible Illness
Growing up, I was a healthy child. I only went to the doctor for check-ups, vaccinations and school forms.
So when, at age fourteen, I woke in the middle of the night in excruciating pain and crawled into my parents’ bedroom to wake them to take me to the emergency room, I wasn’t prepared for what awaited on the other side of those sliding glass doors.
My experience was like a medical TV-show montage—bright lights, beeping monitors, medical professionals hovering over me and talking incomprehensible jargon, soft cries from patients in surrounding rooms, concerned looks on my parents’ faces.
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