• GETTING ON THE BUS Part I of 2

    The first night in a hotel room in Estoril, Portugal, my heart, flipping about in my chest, jolted me awake. Thump. Thump. Thump. Silence. Then a rush of horses’ hooves clopped on my ribs. Trying to ignore my heart’s gymnastics, I tried to go back to sleep but the Mariachi band playing under my ribs…

  • WHITE AMARYLLIS

    In my last post I wrote about the trauma surrounding my cancer diagnosis. In spite of mostly negative consequences of living as a “cancer survivor” there were a few positive occurrences. For example, meeting special people I would have never encountered under normal circumstances. A month after my mastectomy I joined a cancer support group…

  • WHEN CANCER IS NOT CANCER

    I was standing in front of the light boxes hanging on the wall in the breast surgeon’s office staring at the mammogram films of my left breast. The surgeon pointed to lesions that resembled a galaxy of twinkling stars in my milk ducts. The Milky Way. A bad joke. “You’ll need a biopsy,” she said.…

  • MEMORIES OF MICU

    I recently toured a new state-of the-art medical building. The family/visitor side could have been a luxurious hotel. Original paintings by local artists hung on the walls of lounges with soft sofas and recliners illuminated by diffuse lightening. The operating rooms and intensive care units on the opposite side of the building, out of sight…

  • HELLO BEAUTIFUL

    The guy on the motorcycle looked like Jeff. My heart did a flip. His muscular arms jutting from his T-shirt were tan. Of course not like the arms of the guy I knew as Jeff. His were thin and weak. But I imagined this is what Jeff would have looked like before his accident. I…

  • SWEEPING AWAY THE PAST

     My friend and mentor, Carol Henderson, wrote this for our local newspaper. It is a fitting supplement to my last post: Family Stories. May 14, 2013 One of my cousins recently sent out a letter about our grandparents on my dad’s side, giving us some details from their lives. None of us knew much about…