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Healthcare
What They Taught Me
If the child is near death from malnutrition, then the rest of the family must also be hungry. According to Malawian custom, the husband eats first, then the wife, and then the children, in order of age. Often no food is left for the youngest.
June 2005Bible Hockey
Jail seems like a metaphor for the human condition: we all have life without the possibility of parole. And, as in life, some people serve their sentences in nicer places than others. Foxtrot — or “the hole,” as the inmates call it — is the worst place to be. It is like the underworld, a frightening and remote region where everything is cement or metal.
July 2003
Health Care
I’m sitting in my new primary-care physician’s office discussing the hypoglycemia, fatigue, headaches, and food allergies that have been nibbling away at me for the past fifteen years, like so many hungry mice.
May 2003
baby blood
Silas started the way all babies do: a divided cell, a spot of blood. Then, after all the work, the perils of miscarriage, the sickness and swelling, he was born too early, and I found that my precious boy had a bad heart. He needed blood and money and about a million years of good luck.
November 2002
Hospital Attack Wounds 3
Hearing herself, she waves her hand. “It’s not. . . . It’s trucky.” The words leaving her mouth flutter around her like small, confused birds that keep bumping into each other in midflight.
August 2002
We’re Family In Here
I glance sideways at my hospital roommate. Sonya sits erect as a queen in her cranked-up bed, gazing ardently at the goings-on in Julia’s kitchen. Cooking shows are Sonya’s favorite, and she is relieved that I profess to like them, too.
November 2000Caring On Block Two
The young woman lying in the grass in front of Block Two was evidently a problem, but it was hard for me to tell how much of one, or whether I, as a doctor, was supposed to respond. She appeared to be asleep, like some of the other patients who had vacated their mangy hospital beds in order to stretch out on the grass and absorb the warm Nairobi sun. But in her case, something had clearly gone wrong.
September 2000And Jill Came Tumbling After
I’ve heard the story of Ralph’s bicycle accident so many times that it gets on my nerves. Ralph tells it over and over, whenever anybody asks, and even when they don’t. The story goes like this: He went out on Tuesday for his regular sixty-mile training ride. As he came down the hill off Grizzly Peak onto Claremont Avenue, the front tire of his Italian racing bike went flat. He went up on the embankment, riding on the rim. Then he lost control, went headfirst over the handlebars, and landed on his back, snapping his neck in the process.
January 2000La Calidad De La Vida
Every year my back goes out. It’s like a special anniversary, which I celebrate by groaning a lot and walking around like Groucho Marx with his tie caught in his zipper. This year it happens to me in Mexico, where I rent a large, brand-new, slightly leaky, four-bedroom house for sixty dollars a month in the medium-sized town of Jerez de Garcia Salinas, about eight hundred miles due south of El Paso, Texas.
January 2000Infant Ward
This child is not my own, but still the words of possession slip from me: “My baby girl. My sweet baby.” Although I’ve never seen her before, I think I know what she needs: the lights at her hospital bedside dimmed, her loose arms girdled securely against her chest. She has no name except “Girl” and a family surname typed on the identification card at the foot of her crib.
November 1999
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