#13 Recalculating
#13 Recalculating For decades Paul and I have brought together an ever-lovely group of friends and family on our backyard Mt Pollux for Rosh Hashanah. This year it felt important to continue our tradition. I wasn’t feeling 100%, but had so many people help with all...
#12 Organ Recital
As someone who has lived my life in the driver’s seat, it’s not easy being a passenger. As someone who has been the proverbial giver, it’s not easy being the receiver. As someone who has nurtured a career as a healer, it’s hard to be the patient. Of course, no one has...
#9 Bare Bones
We leave Amherst at 8 am for a day of appts at MGH in Boston Wednesday. Slated for bloodwork, a conversation with the clinical trial nurses, meeting with the PA, and a PICC line dressing cleaning (which I immediately reframe as a spa experience! Ah the cool cleansers...
#11 Grape Juice
We drive part way to Boston before answering a call that in fact, they do not have a bed for me. When we return home to our bonus day, we think together, what shall we do? We harvest our overflowing patch of tomatoes and Paul makes his famous slow-cooked-with...
#10 Buzz Cut
I am blessed with a head of thick, dark, hair, often long and usually straight. If there is a quick, low-maintenance way to wear it, I do, from a pony tail, to tucked up in a bun with a chopstick. In my 40s, as eager strands of silvery white wisp into the mix, I like...
#8 Surrender
With any big diagnosis,, or maybe it’s just life, there are bumps along the way. I always hope the bumps smooth out, that they are not too serious, and that reasonable solutions are found. I personally am looking for grace when I hit a bump, but it is not always in...
Field Notes from Fifty-Five Fruit Street #7. Pain
I was not thinking much about pain when I was getting ready to report to duty at Fifty-Five Fruit Street. Mine has been a life devoid of physical pain. Never have a headache, never broke a bone, never had dental pain, don’t suffer from a chronic inflammatory ailment...
Field Notes from Fifty-Five Fruit Street #6. Context Dependent
In our family’s work, each of us is involved with team building and creating unified efforts with articulated goals across our chosen areas of expertise — medicine and healing, the arts, technology, and sports. One thing we all appreciate is that most everything in...
Field Notes from Fifty-Five Fruit Street #5. Shower
In 1986 when Paul and I honeymoon in the North Cascades, neither of us is an experienced backpacker. On one leg of our journey, we arrive at Nancy Lake, at the far end of Lake Chelan at an exquisite campground along the water. After being in the woods and carrying...
The day we check in, staff is running late. We go exploring down Charles Street and around the neighborhood, come back to MGH and run into a construction worker looking out a picture frame window at excavating being done between buildings. I ask him for a verbal tour...