During a nine-hour wait in the DFW airport—lengthened by technical difficulties with our flight—I managed to attract three different people with medical problems. A man and his wife from British Columbia, seated next to me in the waiting area, began chatting with me. They had organized a running marathon on Antarctica—over ice, snow, and rocks—and had gone down there seven years in a row to oversee the event. The subject of Lyme Disease popped up because the man had suffered with the illness for nine years. Of course, I couldn’t help myself from diving right in. After the couple left … Continue reading
Category Archives: Memoir
Before I began my internship, I could never have imagined some of the scenarios I would witness in the middle of the night in the emergency room. Nor would I forget them. The year was 1983. One night, halfway through my internship in family practice, I was on duty at Mercy Medical Center in Denver, Colorado. Just past midnight, the hospital had finally quieted down with a lull in patient admissions coming through the emergency room. It was a rare opportunity for me to take a time-out and put my legs up. Shortly after propping myself up on the narrow … Continue reading
I kneeled in front of John of God, took his hand and looked into his eyes. For an instant it was like looking into deep pools of love, but then his eyes rolled back in his head. He looked like he was completely “gone” and not in his body. Within a few seconds he scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to the translator. As an aide escorted me out of the room, the translator said that I needed “surgery” and special herbs. The journey to Abadiania, Brazil, had been long and exhausting for Gloria, Gloria’s friend … Continue reading
Once I changed the message on my answering machine, my patients began drifting back—at first in a little trickle and then, after several months, in a fast flowing stream like the ones that appear after the snows melt in the high country. One of the first patients to return, a well-known spiritual guide and psychic healer whom I had only seen once before and did not know well, remarked as she sat down, “There’s a lot of activity going on inside your head. I can see waves of heat coming out of your crown chakra. And I can see that … Continue reading
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” —from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. About a week after the brain surgery—as predicted—clumps of hair came out and clogged the drain in the shower. I stared at the strands of brown hair lying at the bottom of the stark white porcelain tub. The back of my head—an area the size of a small grapefruit—felt nearly bald. I quickly steered my thoughts away from the frightful sight by assuring myself that the hair would grow back. But then my mind wandered right … Continue reading
The nationwide search for a neurosurgeon who could help me turned out to be a fruitless endeavor. Then something happened—reminiscent of a deus ex machina in a plot where a god swoops in to turn around a hopeless ending. I got a call from the office of Dr. Cameron McDougall, specialist in fistulas and aneurysm repairs, on the staff at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona—a short drive and plane ride away from Santa Fe. As I barely breathed in anticipation, I listened to the secretary say that Dr. McDougall had probably done more surgeries on carotid cavernous fistulas … Continue reading
“Mom, of course I’d forgive you, but it would be really horrible if you did it. You just have to be strong, Mom.” I could hear in Barrett’s voice that he was trying to be strong himself. “You’ve overcome some really hard things in your life and climbed some really big mountains. You’ve never been a quitter, no matter what. You’ll figure this out, Mom. I know you will. I mean, like, there are guys who come back from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq—wherever—with half their bodies blown off, like from the waist down, and they learn to live with what … Continue reading
As I sat on the floor where I had fallen into a puddle of spilled water, I remembered the neurosurgeon’s words that nothing could be done for me and that I would have to live with my condition. How am I going to live in this never-ending nightmare? I assessed my situation: Both eyes had turned inward toward my nose—the left much more pronounced then the right—leaving me with no peripheral vision. What I saw through my eyes looked chaotic and terrifying with two blurry images of my world—one image real and the other false. Sometimes the images canceled out … Continue reading
In the late fall of 2008, after the sudden and terrifying onset of extreme double vision while driving my car in heavy traffic, I had the sinking feeling that something terrible was happening inside my brain. Based on the ophthalmologist’s guess that the blood pressure medication had caused the double vision, I stopped the Lisinopril and anxiously waited for my vision to return to normal. Every morning I awoke with fresh hope that the double vision had disappeared. But as my eyes opened, I saw the same distorted and disorienting scene in my bedroom day after day. Nothing had changed. … Continue reading
Day Seven, June 14th, my birthday. I’m alive, but still feeling certain that my life will end suddenly at any moment. It occurred to me that the time of my birth might coincide with the time of my death. The day seems interminable and way too hot. I barely notice my surroundings. My energy is sinking and my body is swollen, especially my legs. I am going through the motions of trying to act in a way that won’t cause concern or alarm among my fellow rafters. Only Lenya has a partial sense of the gravity of my condition, but … Continue reading