When I was five years old, more than sixty years ago, I was playing on the top rung of a swimming-pool ladder near our home in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). I lost my footing.
Being very thin, I slipped between the pool ladder and the wall and knocked my chin hard as I fell. Just as in the film Jaws, the blue water (acrid with pool chemicals) bloomed red.
I know about blindness because of Uncle George.
Once, when I was just a kid and was explaining something to him, I casually said, “You see?” then turned white-hot in embarrassment, not that he saw my discomfort.
He responded, “Yeah, Scott, I see what you mean.”
Mother’s Day, 2020. My daughter Skyler was sitting on the tall stool at the kitchen counter, her long hair in a messy bun that she’d pulled apart as she was thinking. For months, she’d been searching for financial support to attend university in the fall. It was the deadline for a scholarship offered by the drug company Vertex to family members of patients who have cystic fibrosis (CF).
Patients like me.
The reality is that I haven’t moved a muscle.
For eight years I have endured intense pain in my left jaw. While having four surgeries, I have also undergone Botox treatment, acupuncture and physical therapy; taken a variety of medications prescribed by pain doctors, neurologists and my primary care physician; and used specially made creams, ice and heat on the affected area. Nothing has worked.
Ronna Edelstein
When my friend Madeline turned seventy, she celebrated in a big way: She walked a half-marathon; she hosted a cabaret for family and friends at which she sang and told stories; she traveled to China. Now, six years later, this dynamic woman has become a virtual prisoner in her apartment. She has undergone back surgery, suffered a nearly fatal intestinal infection and, after a fall, had bolts and screws placed in her hip. Her voice, which once broadcast her energy and joie de vivre, has dwindled to a whisper.
The thread that links all of these bodily assaults is pain. Chronic, intense pain has drained away my friend’s energy and quality of life. No doctor has definitively diagnosed the source of
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
Anna Schmidt
Reprieve
Once the weeks of morning sickness subside, I feel as if I’ve grown wings.
Even with the fatigue, it’s as though someone has pressed a great “reset” button on years of inflammation. That elbow joint that hasn’t straightened fully for years suddenly rediscovers its full range of motion. My knees, too, become straighter and stronger than they’ve been in many years.
Even without the meds, ditched in honor of my growing baby’s health, it is my best and most dramatic remission since my teen years–the last time my hormones went to town.
Maggie Westland
I have a dance routine all in my hands, with steps
To take to make them bend again, at least to stall
The stalk of past abuse, of joint and sinew overuse
This jig more intricate, more complex, more diffuse
Than simple shuffles of the well-shod foot, requires
Both patience brute and gentle force to stake its worth
I dance five times each day twice daily bathe in wax
Or wrap socks full of rice from wrist to finger’s tip
Twist, push, press on in rhythmic jerks response
Marianne Lonsdale
“What’s going to happen to Catie when she grows up?”
I was driving with my son, Nick, to the store when he asked this about his fifteen-year-old cousin, Catie. Nick, age eight, had just spent his spring break at Catie’s home. Blind, she was now losing her ability to talk, but she always recognized Nick’s voice. She adored having him by her side; whenever Nick walked into the room, her face lit up, and she raised her arms for hugs. She was the closest Nick was going to get to having a sibling.
“Will she get a job?” he piped up from the backseat. “Or will someone
I have never told this story to anyone.
It all started one night about ten years ago, three months into my internship. I was on call, having just admitted a man with a possible meningitis.
He now lay curled up in fetal position on the bed in front of me, looking thin and ill. Preparing to administer a lumbar puncture (a diagnostic test that involves removing fluid from the spinal canal), I gently pushed his head further down towards his legs.
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