Hospitals advocate the use of narcotics for pain management with an unconscious zeal, and very carefully refuse to look at the long-term consequences for patients and their families.
“We do not properly appreciate the absence of pain.”
That is a quote from a book I read a long time ago, when I wasn’t much older than my [...]

If the choice is between Prozac and a movie, I’d choose the movie. It turns out, insurance companies will make a different choice.
The dateline for this is early July, 2005.
We were losing him, and not to staph. He’d fought his way back from that hideous allergic reaction, his blood cultures were MRSA negative. [...]

A long hospitalization is a crucible, an experience which burns away all that is unnecessary. What it leaves behind is essential, and luminous.
I can hear his portable VAC unit chirping in the next room. I suppose “chirping” is a euphemism; those disposed to more sophomoric senses of humor (his included) have a different word for [...]

Apparently, the mystery isn’t in the beautiful complexity of the human body, but rather that there is a whole body to be treated.
The moment I understood it was just that serious was when they told me part of his lung had collapsed, and that they didn’t know why.
He’d been in the hospital a month [...]

(On coincidence, modern medicine, modern media, and Michael Moore.)
I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s no such thing as coincindence.
I logged into Alternet.org today (they’re my homepage, though they’re not carrying Molly Ivins these days and I’m not happy about it) and was therefore completely unsurprised to find a well-known filmmaker is planning [...]

Today is August 16th. My son has been home from the hospital for a week, and I’m just starting to feel secure enough about his ability to stay out of the hospital to begin looking around and the life I let drop over a month ago (well, the pretense I had of still having a [...]