Browse Topics

My Left Eye

You’d think at my age I might realize that the spinning bottle of medical fate would eventually stop and point to me. I have known too many people who have passed away: diseased hearts, prostates, and colons; the effects of Agent Orange; or just plain bad luck. As I approach sixty, Why me? is evolving into Why not me?

Sunbeams

It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions but hard to get one single remedy.

Chinese proverb

Alternatives

You sleep and wake up feeling shittier than a dozen hangovers at once. This is an improvement. You still want to die, but now she can make a difference again. She still can’t transfer her strength to you, no matter how hard she tries.

Stethoscope

I am always asking doctors about their medical equipment, so I know that the stethoscope was popularized not because it improved a doctor’s ability to hear a heartbeat — although it had that effect, too — but because in nineteenth-century France it was considered improper to put one’s ear to a man’s chest or, especially, a woman’s bosom. The amplified heartbeat was secondary to the stethoscope’s main function, decorum.

Locked In To Life

In a locked psychiatric facility you’re obliged to keep living — unless, that is, you’re extraordinarily desperate and creative about instruments of self-destruction: a half-pint milk carton, a Chutes and Ladders game board, a plastic spoon.

The Long Goodbye

Katy Butler On How Modern Medicine Decreases Our Chance Of A Good Death

It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum: Which self do we honor? The fully capable, legally responsible person I am right now, who says I don’t want any artificial barrier preventing the natural death that might await me? Or the less-aware self that I might become at a later date, who might say, “No, no. Keep me alive”?

Anything For Love

When I was eight, I was so obsessed with Erich Segal’s novel Love Story that I memorized the first few paragraphs and recited them at every opportunity: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she loved Mozart. And Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

Pity The Man Who Doesn’t Travel

Irish Mike and I had planned my trip — the “Grand Tour,” we liked to call it — on the floor of a job site. While all the other painters and construction workers were busy with lunch and football arguments, we’d draw a map of Europe in the dust with our fingertips and make wavy lines across it for my route.

A Good Idea

It seemed like a good idea when you saw him on the ledge, poised on the other side of the guardrail and staring down at the water. It was nighttime, or almost nighttime, daylight falling into a tailspin of dusk, and the road was empty, and you nearly didn’t see him at all. But when you did, you slowed your car.