Death and Dying

My great aunt is sick. Well, it’s more than that, I suppose.  My great aunt is more than sick. My great aunt is dying.  Right now. My great aunt Katie is my mother’s aunt, her favorite aunt, and we were very close to her when my mother was alive.  Most of my happiest childhood memories [...]

The 20 Year Old Wound

These days I call him “my eldest”.  It’s innocuous enough to not belie his non traditional way into the world, my nearly 22 year old son.  It still stings every time I hear the phrase, “Wow, you look young for your age” (insinuating that of course I must be older than I appear because otherwise [...]

A Labyrinth of Medicine

“How can they still not know what is wrong with you?” I asked, frustrated, after arriving at the hospital the next morning. It had been a crazy day.  I’d picked R up at work, where they did have a small, medical clinic.  The nurse there did tell us which hospital of the two in the [...]

You Can Count On Me

“I just don’t know who to ask for help,” my sister said over the phone. My sister, who still lived in Michigan with her husband and children, needed to have surgery.  This was actually the second surgery she was going to undergo, having had a hysterectomy a few years ago.  She had not healed properly, [...]

Pointing the Way

I sat on the floor with my little boy, him ensconced in the safe area between my legs, feeling my apprehension rise. We were in the middle of an evaluation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a screening for possible developmental delays.  We’d already paid $200 for a similar battery of mind numbing hoops for Michael to [...]

Little Boys and Big Tests

“But what did he say?” I groaned into the phone. I couldn’t believe it when I had started vomiting the night before Michael’s scheduled hydrocephalus check at the Children’s Hospital.  I had never felt so ill in all of my life.  I spent the evening on the sofa in order to not infect R, who [...]

An Odd Intimacy

R’s father joked, “Just think…if you’d been alive a hundred years ago, you’d be dead.” I looked up at him, from my hospital bed with my breast half exposed while my baby nursed happily away, taken aback by his harsh words. I adored R’s father, a European emigre from Croatia.  He had a sunny disposition, [...]

How’d He Get This Number?

“Hello?”  The phone on the bedside table was loud, and I answered it on the second ring.  Fortunately, I was alone in the hospital room, so there was no one to bother, but its loudness still seemed to echo through the sterile quiet of the hospital hallways. A familiar, warm voice on the other end [...]

Inconvenient

It felt all too familiar.  I was laying on an ultrasound table at our doctor’s office, waiting for the bad news to be delivered. The doctor had told me to come in immediately for an ultrasound of my uterus upon hearing my symptoms; waking up with chills, bad cramps, heavy bleeding, huge clots, and a [...]

Late Nights

I woke up to feed my baby, teeth chattering uncontrollably.  It was January, after all, but I never remembered being quite this cold in our home, even in the dead of winter.  Cincinnati had a warmer climate than the one we’d grown up in, and my heaviest sweatshirts sat in the back of my closet, [...]