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Into the Unknown
On March 17, 2015, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. Initially it was thought that I would need only a lumpectomy and radiation, but the biopsy changed everything.
The pathology report said that the tumor was HER2-positive and estrogen/progesterone positive. The HER2 protein makes the cancer more aggressive, so I would need, in addition to surgery and radiation, eighteen weeks of standard chemotherapy, a year of two other infused drugs and a hormone-blocking oral drug.
Still, the cancer was stage 1a with a decent prognosis, according to my oncologist, who said, “The good news here is that we have treatments for every part of your cancer. You are lucky.”
Hope Is the Thing With Feathers
When my son Locklin was a month old, he became very sick. He started throwing up and kept throwing up and ended up in the hospital.
The hospital ID band on my son’s wrist fit on my ring finger. I could cradle my son’s whole body in my hands.
The oxygen meter clamped to his finger was the size of a paper clip. It glowed red and blue, the colors of emergency, like tiny police lights flashing against bleached hospital sheets.
What Little Separates Us
Among the handful of patients who visited the emergency department one night in June with abdominal pain, rashes or fevers, I especially remember Michelle. She was a woman in her late twenties, eight weeks pregnant with her second child. I was a second-year resident, and she had come for help with something I’d already encountered over a dozen times in my training.
“I think I might be having a miscarriage,” she said. She stopped herself, then looked at me as if to gauge my reaction.
“How Does It Look?”
I was born in the mid-1950s into a family where juvenile (type 1) diabetes played a prominent role. A year before my birth, my brother, age four, was diagnosed; when I was three, my sister, age thirteen, received the same pronouncement. As the “healthy” child, I watched my stressed parents try to manage the disease using the existing therapies.
High Stakes
As a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist, I’ve been trained to treat depression and evaluate suicidal risk. Yet when it comes to working with an adolescent who expresses a wish not to exist, trying to clarify what’s actually meant feels daunting.
I’m reminded of this one Monday morning as thirteen-year-old Paula sits across from me in the interview room.
Living and Letting Go in the ICU
Driving from the Atlanta airport, I arrived at the hospital ICU where my mother had been admitted the day before for trouble breathing. This was the hospital where my siblings and I were born and where our father died. This was the hospital featured in The New York Times following the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. The hospital still sees record numbers of COVID admissions, and I expected the staff to show signs of exhaustion and numbness to personal tragedy.
My brother was at our mother’s bedside, as he had been from the beginning. The critical-care attending physician was also present.
“Does the hospital have a palliative-care unit?” I asked.
The Last Beat
It was midmorning at the hospital where I was a clinical medical-surgical instructor. I was standing at the medications cart with Sally, one of my third-year nursing students. One of the floor nurses approached.
“You have Anna in Room 44, don’t you?” she asked Sally.
Sally nodded.
“You better go in there,” continued the nurse. “She doesn’t look too good.”
Time Splintered
Time fractured when my first husband died.
There was a before, which no longer existed, and an after, which was unimaginable.
In between, the thinnest–unfathomably thin–line, was the today. The today meant putting one foot in front of the other. One today led to the next today. And finally the year was over.
Love Is the Key
Collecting dust on the rustic wooden shelves above a sturdy workbench in my basement are models of history-making ships, spaceships and military fighter planes. There’s an enormous replica of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, complete with iconic NASA logo and a massive orange fuel tank nestled next to its launch tower. Not far off is a black-and-brown plastic replica of the forty-four-gun frigate USS Constitution, its hull held together by two gigantic bolts.