Sickness
The Psychic Was Right
Word Count 1,220
I am in Los Angeles for five days. I am here on ‘screenwriting’ business, seeing friends, and it is Valentine’s Day. I am on a date with a guy I met through work - a television Producer.
He takes me to some fancy-schmancy restaurant up in Malibu Canyon, and I’m on my second glass of wine, having just finished my frisee & pear salad with bleu cheese, when the headache starts up again. Pounding, pounding, pounding – it feels as if my head is going to split open & explode. I have been having horrible blinding headaches for about a month, and they keep getting worse, and here I am experiencing a god awful blinding headache, and this time, at this restaurant, on this first date, it comes back in a fury.
Living In The In-Between
Word Count 989
On round three of your cancer” journey,” as some like to call it, I like to think of it as an interminable boxing match; there comes a time when you simply have to move from denial towards acceptance of the fact that your death awaits you, possibly sooner than later. My oncologists advise me to “stay positive,” but it’s not realistic or possible or even advisable on a daily basis. I want to check out what not positive looks like.
Covid Island
Word Count 2,588
On March 13th, 2020, I left Brooklyn for Martha’s Vineyard. With me in the car: my 14 year old daughter Sky, our dog, and a couple of weekend bags. Unlike many New Yorkers who would pack up in the coming days and weeks to flee the city’s mushrooming health crisis, I was just heading up for the weekend. My husband Ed was in Atlanta. My son, on spring break, was already on the island with his cousins. Things were getting weird, for sure. Sky’s school had closed its doors “temporarily”. President Trump was about three hours away from declaring a national emergency. But, still, when I popped my coffee mug in the dishwasher and turned the key in our front door, I had no idea just how strange things were going to get.
A House Riddled With Termites
Word Count 856
I’m a house riddled with termites, is what my aunt Adele used to say. She was a tiny thing, not even 5’ tall, although endowed with a prodigious bosom. She had skinny, bird-like legs and favored cotton batik shifts she wore loose, without a belt. She prided herself on rarely being sick and bragged she’d never missed a day of work, but now, at 65, her eyesight was failing, and she’d developed gout and diabetes, along with a heart murmur. She was never the same after being mugged on the street in NYC a couple of blocks from her home. Her assailant struck her on the back of the head with a brick or rock stuffed inside a sock. He took his swing, and down she went, at which time he grabbed her handbag and ran off. The thief was never apprehended, and Adele was somehow diminished. Her heart went out on her not six months after moving into a fancy assisted living community her financial consultant found. She died, leaving me a little money. Enough money to buy a horse.
The Country Of Illness
Word Count 693
I’m going to tempt fate by saying that my entire life has been cocooned in the blessing of good health. There’ve been some difficulties—a preemie, a miscarriage, a hip replacement—but mostly, my physical plant works the way it’s supposed to.
This smoothly working physical engine of mine seems all the more remarkable because my mother has had rheumatoid arthritis for more than sixty years. The disease is a constant presence in her life—our lives—an uninvited, ubiquitous guest: we call it Arthur.
Confinement
Word count 1,408
"We're going to have to admit you," someone in scrubs said, "your water broke. The risk is too high." By now, it was eleven at night, and I hadn't had any dinner.
"Ok," I said. "Overnight?"
"Until the baby is born," she said, with a small shake of the head,
This presence bouncing around inside me, knocking into my bladder and spleen, had just started wiggling in earnest a few weeks before, the familiar rising of bubbles turning into pokes saying hello. Twenty-two weeks out of forty. "I can't stay here for months," I said.
"It's likely to be at any time, maybe a day or two. I'm very sorry."
And so began my confinement.
Oh, Her
Word Count 1,196
You need an appointment to look at wigs at this shop. My friend Nancy recommended it, and she said to spend the money and get a real hair wig as they are the only ones that look real and natural. She wears hers every day as she is still teaching, and she says it is worth the more than $1,000 price tag. I really don’t want to go, it is so hard to look in the mirror each morning, paint on some eyebrows, buff on some powder, wanting to look like myself, and I don’t. I used to have all that hair that people always commented on, and it was the first thing Jerry noticed about me.
Who Wrote It?
Word Count 1,528
“Who wrote your memoir?” a friend asked.
My book—Losing the Atmosphere, A Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood—is about living with and healing from dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality disorder. He was asking which of my parts—my term for alter personalities—wrote it. I had to think before I answered.
For most of my adult life, whenever I was in public, I tried to ensure that only the “regular” sliver of me was visible. I was successful, but at a price. Maintaining a nonstop filter and translator between the calm exterior I presented to the world, and my internal chaos was exhausting.
The Nervous Hospital
Word Count 867
I was 8 years old when my mother was institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital in Worthington, Ohio. Back home in Buffalo, I called it "the nervous hospital." That made my gloomy father laugh.
During her stay, she talked to psychiatrists, had electroshock therapy and made necklaces with beads. My stomach ached when I pictured electricity in her brain. Still, I didn't miss her silence, her stern face or her somersaults in the living room. I certainly didn't miss her chicken à la king.
Ever since I could remember, it seemed she'd get near me only to set my hair. She would come at me with a plastic bag of bobby pins, sit me on the stairs and stick them in my head. "You don't want to look like an unmade bed," she always said. One day, when I rushed home from first grade waving my first report card -- almost all straight A's -- she stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me. "Shhh," she said. "I'm making Jell-O." She didn't turn around.
The Dread Of A Shred
Word Count 1,534
I’ve had a headache for thirty days. OK, I’m lying. It’s closer to sixty, but sixty days sounds terribly long. Terribly scary. I know it’s been closer to sixty days because my niece was visiting, and the day she left to go back home was a Sunday, and it was four days before her twenty-seventh birthday, which is not important to this story, but those facts are how I remember that it’s been close to sixty days now with this constant headache that is sometimes dull and mildly annoying, but sometimes severe. Always, all day long. I wake with it. I go to sleep with it. It never leaves me alone, neither the pain of it nor the psychological impact.
Imagine If…
Word Count 639
Imagine If…
Written after reading “Imagine” by Lynn Ungar
I’m not saying it could happen, but imagine just for a moment if one day we woke up and people who needed the most help were regarded as the most important people. Pretend just for a moment that caring for humans, the vulnerable tender skin of babies, the paper thin skin of the old, the bodies that need a spoon to be raised to their mouths, the ones who don’t wake up in the night when they pee and need their bed to be changed and made dry, the ones who need their arms and legs slipped through sleeves and pants, who need the tiny tender moments of a belt clasped, earrings put through lobes, their hair brushed - imagine if you will, waking up and this was the highest status work and everyone wanted to be closer to this vulnerability.