She wears diapers. She eats with her fingers, and wears a bib. When prompted she will use a fork or a spoon, but often the food ends up on her clothes or the floor. She’s mostly non-verbal. She can’t walk, although with assistance she can take a few steps. She spends most days sitting [...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ category
Pinky
It sounds: like a fun thing to get: con-junct-ivitis. Hookin’ up words and prhases and clauses. You think: I will hook up words and phrases and clauses. You think: I will become a human contraction – two things, to ideas together as one: are not? Aren’t? No. Am. You are? Indeed. You’re? Yes. Yours.
It feels: [...]
Imposture
I have this urge that is harder and harder to fight where I walk up to people and touch the middle of their upper back, gently touching that point which makes you want to open out your chest and straighten the spine.
I am horrified by bad posture. All around me I see old women [...]
The dilemma
Fresh out of college, you take a job as a nanny in a foreign country, so you can learn the language while making a little money. You’re living with an American family at the U.S. embassy, taking care of their one-year-old daughter. You spend your free time roaming the streets of the exotic capital city [...]
How to have heart surgery
My dad just had open-heart surgery to replace a poorly functioning valve. He never had any kind of cardiac “event,” just discovered the problem during checkups and follow-up visits to the doctor. This kind of surgery — valve replacement — is deemed “routine,” even though they crack your chest open.
There has been nothing routine about [...]
Her best client
I have a crush on my physical therapist.
She is all Charlize-Meg-Reese perky with blond curly hair and eyes the color of her pale blue sweater. She is like a favorite second grade teacher who always knew what to say and when to say it and we all vied for front row seats in her classroom. She smiles [...]
I hereby resolve
Resolved: To take a multivitamin every day, rather than buying those big bottles of them and forgetting to take them until they’re out of date.
Resolved: To get Lasik. Someday.
Resolved: To play my guitar more before the dust swallows it completely and it’s just a giant faux termite hill in the corner of my living [...]
To Live and Ride in LA
Los Angeles is known as a city of millions of cars. Things are just too far apart, and public transportation just too slow and sparse, to make it easy *not* to own one. Houston, apparently, has the most cars per household in the country, but we’ve got the worst traffic-related congestion and pollution. [...]
Help
I was all set to write my blog about something else, when I ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with a friend who is breaking down mentally, emotionally and physically. This is not the first time you have heard of this friend.
So, it’s making me think about how we help each other, or [...]
On Sickness and in Health
I’m writing this in a waiting room at Georgetown University hospital, where a friend is having an MRI. She’s been healthy her whole life, but in the past couple of months has endured a whole catalogue of physical and emotional ills — stomach pain, severe indigestion, back pain, anxiety, insomnia. This morning, she said to [...]
