So if you happen to be the spouse of a very ill person hours away from undergoing the single most difficult (deliberate) surgical procedure on the books (the Whipple Procedure) and at the most inappropriate time and place find yourself yelling at said spouse over absolutely nothing, knock it off as soon as you can, apologize profusely to said spouse and anyone else witnessing said meltdown and move on. This is a rough time. Cut yourself some slack. Melt Downs Happen. Feeling like a fool shouldn't be a ne...
But on the other hand I'm not exactly telling the truth when I assure my life partner she is not alone as she undergoes the Whipple Procedure to remove the neuro endocrine tumor from her pancreas. We both, at this point, get it that she will, indeed, be alone excluding the surgical team during the surgery and, yes, during her recovery no matter how long I wait with family to hear that the surgery was successful and no matter how many hours I sit by her bedside. Still, though, I will say anything of assur...
FROM THE NOT QUITE A STREET BAND GUIDE TO AMELIA LIVING performed at The Last Book Store in Los Angeles - But This Is Different came from my imagination. I made up the story and I made up the characters in the story. That the two central characters bear the names of very famous women makes a powerful statement that even cultural icons often went to great lengths to claim and live the love that just now begins to have a name and that all too often those carefully planned great lengths just couldn’t becom...
This week’s Torah portion, Vaetchanan (Deuteronomy 3:23 – 7:11) contains the Sh’ma, (Deut. 6:4-9) which begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God; the Lord is one.” You may find the rest of the prayer easily, because these words may be those most often spoken in Jewish prayer. They appear in every Jewish service at least once, they are the words that we say as our bedtime prayer, they form the end to the all-day Yom Kippur service and they are supposed to be the last words a Jew utters on the deathbe...
I don't think the Olympic judges have the same creative interpretation of the term "freestyle" as I do. I would throw a whole pile of gold medals at any 300m Freestyle swimmer who started with a cannonball, performed a few minutes of water ballet followed by a quick round of Marco Polo, then finished with a pretend drowning and a fake dead-man's float.
In 1964 Norman Cousins - professor, author, and editor of the Saturday Review - was diagnosed with a condition known as Anklosing Spondylitis in which the connective tissue in his spine was deteriorating. He was given a 1 in 500 chance of survival. He wrote a book about his diagnosis and his recovery - Anatomy of an Illness - in which he tells us that he wanted to play an active part in his treatment. This alone was a far cry from traditional medical treatment in that day. The first thing Cousins did was...
That first night of hospital admission through the Emergency Room began a period of stunned acceptance during which we both struggled to wrap our minds around the sudden and massive changes in our joined and separate lives. While in the surreal hospital 'what the hell is happening' world a whole other life lived without us. It was this life that ultimately - once we knew the number of the room in which my spouse would spend the night - took me home. The dog hadn't been outside since early afternoon. It w...
"We are legally married in California."Throughout that first hospitalization I felt compelled to offer this defense, this clarification, to every hospital employee who walked into the room. After hearing the explanation of my presence not one person even raised an eyebrow. Nevertheless, I continued to explain. I was convinced that if I were a man the automatic assumption would have been that my partner - a woman - and I were married. Seeing two women in the room, I assumed the automatic explanation was t...
Hospital admission took place through the Emergency Room even though we did not consider this an emergency. In that holding area between life as we knew it and life as it was to become, we began learning our new language with terms like poorly defined, density, dilation, inferior portion, vena cava mm, cm, superior aspect, nodules, and lobes. I tried to read the expressions of everyone who entered our room - looking for something that communicated, "This is nothing. You'll both be home before you know it...
