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Wednesday’s Child
Cortney Davis
It was a Wednesday in late spring, 1972. I was a nursing student in my final months of training, eagerly awaiting graduation.
When I arrived on the maternity ward that morning, my nursing instructor told me that I’d be caring for a baby, only hours old, with special needs.
I thought she’d send me to the neonatal ICU. Instead, to my surprise, she motioned toward the linen closet, its doors closed tight.
“The baby was born without a complete brain,” she said. “A condition called anencephaly. He can’t see or hear. And,” she added, “they don’t expect he’ll live out the day. So try not to get attached.”
Last Writes
Hilton Koppe
Jeez mate, you are really dead. “Really fucking dead,” as you would say. I don’t need to be a doctor to know that. The cop who rang me was right. You must have been sitting in your lounge chair, dead, for at least twelve hours, maybe more. Looks like you were enjoying a quiet drink when you checked out.
I’ve got to tell you mate, it’s pretty weird sitting here at your dining table, with you there, slumped over all mottled and cold, while I’m trying to fill out your death certificate. With your advance-care directive staring at me from on top of all your papers on the table. Was it left there as a gift for me? I did feel
How Will I Know You’re Not Dead?
Raymond Abbott
I never thought it would go on for so long–seeing Donald Wyatt, I mean. I certainly didn’t plan it this way.
More than six years ago, I retired at age sixty-six from my social-work job at a mental-health agency. Donald had been my client there for about eight years.
As I was cleaning out my office, his mother called. She explained how Donald’s father had left when Donald was not much more than an infant, which had made him sensitive to abandonment, especially by male figures. Could I, she wondered, meet Donald once in awhile for coffee or lunch?
“Yes,” I said, “I can do that.”
Surprise Ending
Ellen Kolton
“He’s just expired,” said the nurse as I approached Ray’s room in the large inner-city hospital where I work as a patient advocate. “And his wife has just arrived. Why don’t you go in?”
I found Natalie bent over Ray’s body. His hollow cheek was drenched with her tears.
“I’m so sor–“
“I told him yesterday to talk to Jesus,” Natalie interrupted, speaking quickly. “I told him if the two of them decided it was time for him to go, then it was okay with me. I guess they had their talk,” she said, glancing at Ray as though expecting an answer.
My Father’s Girl
I’m walking very slowly with my dad down the produce aisle at the local supermarket, past the colorful waxed apples, Mexican mangoes and Rainier cherries, and imagining my life’s blood trickling onto the floor from an invisible wound.
As I pass by the misting system spraying the bins of green, red, yellow and orange peppers, past the lady reaching for carrots, past the stock guy balancing the heirloom tomatoes into a precarious stack, I want to scream. The sense of loss is overpowering.
Chocolate Cake
Sanyu Janardan
I was a first-year medical student, starting my first afternoon at an outpatient clinic as part of an introductory course in clinical medicine. My white coat was freshly washed; I had a rainbow of pens in one coat pocket, and my shiny name tag dangled from the other. I only hoped that I was as prepared as I looked.
I entered Mrs. Carr’s room. A fifty-five-year-old woman, she sat gingerly at the edge of her chair, looking ready to get up at any moment, as if the appointment were already over. She gave me a cursory glance, then went back to folding and refolding the bus-ticket stub in her hands.
I asked a well-rehearsed question: “What brings you to our
Go Ask Alice
Ellen Rand
In 2010, I became a hospice volunteer.
My mother had died of a brain tumor five years earlier at age eighty-seven. I saw being a hospice volunteer as a way to express my gratitude for my mother’s compassionate hospice care and to help other caregivers to weather a loved one’s passing. And, as a former reporter and writer, I thought I could help people to write their life stories, if they were interested.
In short, I wanted to act on E.M. Forster’s words, which for me sum up the goal of hospice: “Only connect.”
I soon realized, though, that by the time most people come to hospice, they’re too ill and/or too demented to carry on a conventional conversation,
Thirty Below
Kristie Johnson
One cold February morning during my third year of medical school, I walked through the entrance of the rural hospital where I was doing a nine-month rotation, and made my way to the nurses’ station. Feeling the warmth return to my face, I set down my coat and bag and hung my stethoscope around my neck.
The charge nurse, Barb, waved me to her computer.
“Kristie, you have a patient.”
She shuffled through papers, grabbed a blank chart and placed the patient’s admission note on top. When she saw the name, her face fell.
“Ah, it’s Peggy.”
Sick of Getting Sick
I awoke one Saturday morning to a terribly familiar feeling–a tight, barky cough, fast breathing, severe shortness of breath and burning in my chest. Another severe asthma attack. I knew I was in trouble.
Twenty-three years ago, when I was an internal-medicine resident, I went to be evaluated for recurrent pneumonia. I wound up being diagnosed with cough-variant asthma. Most asthmatic patients wheeze; when my asthma is bad, I cough.
I now realize that I’ve probably had asthma all my life. When I was a child, though, cough-variant asthma wasn’t recognized as a disease, at least not in the small upstate New York town where I was raised. So, instead, I was the “sickly child”–the one who got a cold with a cough