Two weeks ago marked the sixth month anniversary of my bone marrow transplant. I wrote the following in the weeks after leaving the hospital. The marrow has arrived downstairs, the nurse says. It needs to go through some final tests before we can start. My mom hands my dad a sheet with a prayer and [...]
In waiting rooms people watch and read and talk. If it’s a crowd that starts to recognize itself they talk to skip over the uncertainties engendered just watching or reading. Lynn has been looking at me but not saying anything for the last few visits. She wants the details. After our fourth consecutive Wednesday together [...]
My move to the West Coast has meant spending most of my time seeing doctors. A good bone marrow transplant demands preparation. But when there is some down time, it’s spent with my caregiver. She’s the only person I know out here. She’s also my mother. She has a thing for asking me questions about [...]
I worked for a pain management doctor before I was told I couldn’t work anymore. We did procedures. Laid the patient face down on the table and poked and prodded, usually, along the spine. Often the needles were large. Over a half of a year, I saw people react very differently to these “procedures.” Some [...]
The Roman philosopher Cicero said “In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.” At times you will meet a doctor who buys this. More times, however, you will meet patients who do. As was the case with an older gentleman I spoke with briefly in a waiting room [...]
I check my e-mail often. Once, twice, fifteen times a day. My messages are always read in the order they’re received. The first is from an old friend who wants to do know what they can do to help. Anything, they write, really anything you need. They ask me how I’m feeling, if I think [...]
On a sunny Wednesday with a high, cloudless sky, a boy sits on a bench. He sits slightly hunched, vacantly gazing off, on just one of the many benches outside this particular medical center. He sits with a head full of thoughts and a growing awareness that his story, so important to him, is fantastically dull when grouped [...]
The waiting room is full of us today, anxious people waiting to see our doctor. There are 13 or 14 of us in this room, and in a another one down the hall, 13 or 14 more. This pattern continues on for quite sometime—this is a big place, like factory big. Before we found ourselves [...]
If I’m out, I’m wearing a mask—one of those easter egg blue surgical ones. Its Monday. I walk down the frozen food aisle of the local grocer. A mother pulls her children away from me, pulls them away from the guy who must have some horrific disease or he wouldn’t be wearing that thing. I [...]
I hate to bring up the past, but here’s a story. Three weeks ago, before I knew my brother was not a match, before I underwent the ATG treatment, I met with the bone marrow transplant team. Standard procedure. Thought being, if my brother is a match we have all the semantics out of the [...]
A. Anemia News
