“Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s June 20th, Summer Solstice and here on California’s north coast the winter rains are still nearly incessant. Granted that it’s a temperate rain forest, but honestly, the deal is supposed to be that we suffer through 8 months of unending rain (I’m not exaggerating. Well, not by much) and then get to revel in [...]

On stem cells, roses, and the fallacies inherent in the “culture of life” philosophy. All life has intrinsic value. I was inspecting our new roses this weekend, removing pests, fertilizing the soil after this month’s nearly incessant rains, removing any weeds lest the beautiful, fragrant flowering hedge in my dreams become choked with noxious sow [...]

I had another one of those gawd-awful deja-vu moments just now, reading this article at DailyKos. The offending quote is this one, uttered by none other than our president, George “W Stands for Witless” Bush: “But I have made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers’ money, to promote [...]