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Mom Journeys to the Other Side

William Bryan August 26, 2011 No Comments

William Bryan

Mom was not fully conscious when she crossed over, but I’m quite certain she was aware of both sides of the veil as she departed the realm of the living. This is a brief story of her dying.

After my dad died, more than twenty years ago, my mom moved from our family home to live with my brother, Jim, and his wife, Barb.

In retrospect, it was an act of supreme foresight, ensuring that she’d be able to stay in a family setting even if she became unable to care for herself at some point. She enjoyed many quality years with her four grandchildren and traveled with her family to Greece, Maui and Croatia, among other exotic places.

Mom’s travels came to

Are You a Doctor?

Margaret Kim Peterson August 5, 2011 No Comments

Margaret Kim Peterson

“Are you a doctor?”

I am sitting by my husband’s hospital bed in the surgical admission ward, where he is being prepped for surgery to close a severe pressure ulcer on his left ischium, the knob on the pelvis where your weight rests when you sit.

Dwight was eighteen when an illness damaged his spinal cord, rendering him a paraplegic. He is 49 now, and developing the kinds of problems that go along with being a middle-aged cripple (his self-descriptor of choice).

One such problem is pressure ulcers. We thought we’d learned how to manage these, but met our match in this one, which has refused

Mementos and Memories

Paul Rousseau July 15, 2011 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

Delores sits tilted to the right in a worn wheelchair, a curtain separating her from a sleeping roommate.

She is wearing a blue blouse stained with something orange, perhaps Jell-O, and white pants and white socks. A worn gold wedding band adorns the fourth finger of her left hand. Her hair is a shiny gray, perfectly coiffed, and her face is etched with deep wrinkles, a testament to eighty-nine years of life.

A tiny bedside shelf displays two faded black-and-white photos from the 1930s or ’40s: one is of Delores in her twenties, a demure smile on her face; the other shows Delores with a young man

Hospital Librarian

Pam Kress-Dunn June 10, 2011 No Comments

Pam Kress-Dunn

Some people seem surprised to find a library in a hospital. But it’s here, and so am I. Having been a librarian in lots of different libraries–public, academic, archival–I jumped at this job when it opened up. Little did I know what I was getting into.

Like many medical librarians, I work solo. I do have a volunteer who, despite being decades older than me, works tirelessly during the two days a week she’s here. But I’m the one who does the lit searches, tracks down the articles in medical journals and finds the piece of information the doctor requires before the surgery that’s scheduled for noon.

ICU

Sara Rempe May 27, 2011 No Comments

Sara Rempe

The women moved through silence
like monks through a garden, all focus

and white cotton, soaping, rinsing,
lifting her body to sponge

her swollen skin. We were
there when they cleaned her

of diarrhea, sliding an arm
under her when she struggled to move

she’d groan, suck in, drop–
limbs like thin shoots

of bamboo: rickety and trembling
under a papery sheet.

She’d climbed a mountain the week
before, stretching in the thin pure

air, ecstatic,
as though it were something other

than her body
that brought her there.

About the poet:

Sara Rempe

Shujinwa Byoki Des

Lucy Moore February 4, 2011 No Comments

Lucy Moore

I don’t speak Japanese, but I can say “Shujinwa byoki des” (my husband is sick).

After spending a month in Bali studying art, sweating profusely and slapping mosquitoes, we were heading home to New Mexico, with a stop in Hiroshima on the way. Our first morning there, my husband, Roberto, woke with a fever of 103 and a full body rash.

The hotel had a thermometer, but no doctor. As Roberto’s fever neared 104, we hailed a cab for Hiroshima City Hospital. (That was when I pieced together shujinwa byoki des from my pocket dictionary.)

In the large, orderly waiting room, we were the only Caucasians. Roberto was a sight–lobster-red and wild-eyed. Staff and patients politely averted their eyes.

A nurse led us to the

Sweet Lies

Marilyn Hillman March 19, 2010 No Comments

Marilyn Hillman

I can sense the question before it comes.

“How are you doing?”

I want to answer, How do you think I’m doing, with my husband morphing into a ghost? I’m dying here. But thanks for asking.

Instead I clench my fists and deliver a cheerful response: “I’m good.” Which is, of course, a lie.

My husband is demented.

I cannot say these words out loud. Pushed to the wall, I’ll say that my husband has dementia, like it’s temporary–a virus curable by bed rest and chicken soup. Murray admits only to memory problems, while I split hairs over which verb I can stand to put next to his decline. We skitter around the truth like insects caught

Maman

Paul Gross November 20, 2009 No Comments

Paul Gross

At a recent religious service I attended with Maman, my 87-year-old mother, I watched her fumbling attempts to find hymn number 123, “Spirit of Life,” in the hymnal. I held my book up, opened to the appropriate page, so that we both could sing from it.

She glanced up momentarily, tightened her lips, hunched forward and resumed turning pages, finally arriving at the song when the congregation was singing the second verse, which she needed help finding–what with her poor vision and the swirl of notes and words on the page.

As this ritual repeated itself, hymn after hymn, it occurred to me how much cozier it would be if my mother and I could share from the same hymnal.

Giving Care

Ronna L. Edelstein June 26, 2009 No Comments

Ronna L. Edelstein

When I was six, my family and I spent a week in Atlantic City. I loved the Boardwalk with its saltwater-taffy aroma and colorful sights, but I feared the pier that jutted far out into the Atlantic. One moonless night, my big brother bet me a bag of taffy that I couldn’t walk to the pier’s end by myself. Never one to back down, I accepted his bet. But the farther out I walked, the more frightened I got. It felt like one more step would send me off the pier’s edge and into the bottomless black water. My parents rescued me by dashing to the end of the pier and carrying me back to safety.

I spent the next half-century living

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: caregiving

Mom Journeys to the Other Side

Are You a Doctor?

Mementos and Memories

Hospital Librarian

ICU

Shujinwa Byoki Des

Sweet Lies

Maman

Giving Care

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: caregiving

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