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Physical Health
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
The Cure We Wait For
But there is no time for mind games: chemo and radiation, both necessary, my doctor insists. I leave his office in a daze, knowing that cancer is an enemy to fear, yet not wanting to be afraid of anything. I wonder how deep inside me the answers to my pending decisions are buried. Part of me knows that the cure goes beyond what their weapons can touch, that I must search for it from the inside out.
March 2003
Who Causes This Sickness?
Before Hippocrates and his Corpus — a collection of some sixty medical treatises that marked the birth of modern medicine — the ancient Greeks investigated illness by asking the question “Who causes this sickness?” The answer was often a capricious or malevolent deity. The Hippocratics dissolved this notion, professing instead the theory that the human body was comprised of four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
January 2003Be True To Your School
Well, I finally got the last e-mail you sent me. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. They only let us use the “lab” three days a week now (I don’t know why they call it that) since the seniors complained that the underclassmen were hogging all the “lab time.” They keep saying that we’re going to get more computers, but who knows? It still smells like band-aids in here, in case you were wondering.
January 2003baby 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
Cynthia
Most people thought Cynthia was crazy — and perhaps she was. Isn’t it crazy to park your car (a black 1958 Oldsmobile with a large, garish strawberry painted on the passenger door) anywhere you want to: on curbs, lawns, sidewalks? To sleep three hours a night and eat a stick of butter for dinner?
September 2002
What You Leave Is Yours To Leave
I hated my parents’ goats. I hated them because they were stupid and always looked at me as if it were for the first time. And that lack of recognition never changed, from the day they arrived until the night they saved my life.
September 2002
This Bastard Day
It is March 4, a Sunday, and the Northeastern United States is buttoning up for a gigantic snowstorm. Despite these dire weather predictions, in which I have little faith, I have journeyed to Pittsburgh with my wife and two young sons to visit Philip DeLucia, my oldest friend in the world, who is very ill.
July 2002
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