Issue 9 – Non-Fiction

In the way of five-year-olds, my kindergartener is convinced he knows sign language. He moves his hands and arms around in elaborate gestures that sometimes involve his hips, and then quizzes me on what he just said. 

Somewhere between the second and third year of medical school, you start to grow tired of the phrase “You can’t just know the information — you have to apply it.” They keep telling us that, but they don’t exactly tell you how to do that. Medical school is a game of memorization in large part. How many tidbits of information can you squeeze in your brain? Not only that, but can you dig it back out after months of putting it in? 

My husband, R, and I sat on the couch in the living room of our London rental listening on speakerphone to Dr. P, a senior pulmonary specialist at an east London hospital as she took care of R’s father, ill with COVID-19 pneumonia.

My son was eight years old when he was struck and thrown by a car while riding his bike. Of course, this was a traumatic event, but he seemed to bounce back quickly. My little boy soon looked and acted his same self.  He was running, laughing, studying just as he had been before he was hurt.

It was just after midnight on the Ides of March when I first held my daughter—merely an hour old—and watched the nurses try to save her mother’s life.