The Nightstand
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Poverty has many ways of marking a child.
Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s in a Southern cotton-mill town, I was the fourth of six children of a single mother who did the best that she could; but her job as a hemmer of washcloths in Plant #1 paid little, and six children had many necessities that shut the door on nonessentials.
Growing up in the textile town, I was reminded of my poverty by what I could not have.
My Doctor Joe
Winter 1961
I recall Dr. Ulrich making a house call that night to our residential shoebox on Longview Avenue in Akron, Ohio. My parents were renting the pint-size place. My mother loathed visiting cemeteries and talking about death, so I suspect she felt edgy living across the street from the roomy Sherbondy Hill Cemetery.
That freezing night in 1961, I lay in my parents’ bed, a big bed that swallowed up my little-boy body. I wanted to fall asleep, but I was too restless.
Telehealth from the Driveway
My computer chimed a familiar DING, and my patient’s face flashed up on the screen. They were seated in their car, parked in the driveway of their grandchildren’s home, before they went inside for a visit. My patient eagerly declared, “Today is the day!” A broad smile graced their face. “I’m ready,” they said.
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A Duplexity of Maladies
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
I have a body besieged by two chronic illnesses, namely multiple sclerosis (MS) and bipolar disorder. My health profile has been described as “abnormal,” but I’ve always resisted that term in favor of “atypical,” for my poor health renders me unusual but not inhuman.
Still, the truth is that I am essentially and profoundly sick. My imbalanced body frequently aches, hurts and falls, my labile mind races or crawls. While medications can ameliorate my symptoms, they cannot cure my illnesses.
My body betrayed me when I was on the cusp of adulthood.
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No One Left to Save
“Do you want to call time of death?”
I stared up at my resident Hassan, shocked by his question. My stethoscope was still pressed to the elderly patient’s emaciated chest. Her agonal breaths, those last shallow breaths the body takes before death, had ceased. Only silence filled my ears.
Hassan smiled at me. I knew that he was offering this to me as a reward for all my hard work, but still, I was stunned.
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Oh, Susanna
Susanna came into the U.S. fighting the mosquito-borne viral disease chikungunya. Her thin body, wracked with fever, shivered and fought off the infection; her family back in her home country called around for a PCP who would see her. They found me and scheduled an appointment. I knew the signs and symptoms of chikungunya, and I knew the hard mass I felt in her belly was something else.
She was diagnosed with cancer two days later and started chemotherapy as soon as she recovered from her infection.
The Scabs We Have
In September, I was called back for dermatological surgery after a biopsy on my left calf revealed a severely dysplastic nevus—a result of the hours I spent tanning in the 1990s.
I canceled my morning clinic while I had the procedure. The surgeon took what she needed and stitched me up. The medical assistant put on a bandage and told me to keep the leg elevated for 12 hours.
The Waiting Room
What happened to the fish
I ask the receptionist
The plastic seaweed was toxic
She replies with a shrug
So we sit and wait watching
A string of jeweled bubbles rise
To the surface
In the otherwise empty tank
Camp Fire Memories
Five years have passed since the morning of November 8, 2018. As I headed out that day, an unusual cloud formation was developing in the eastern sky, over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. My colleagues and I would soon learn a wildfire had been sparked and was engulfing the neighboring communities of Concow and Paradise, California. It would become the state’s most destructive and deadly wildfire, killing eighty-five residents, many of whom died in their cars while attempting to flee.
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