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surgery: Philadelphia Metropolis Harder Than I Thought
By Debra Bourdeau McLoughlin»
It was harder than I thought.
We had joked about it - "Promise you'll pull the plug," my mother would say. "Sure, no problem, " I'd answer. And we'd laugh. As time went by it was less joking and more promising. I promise I won't let you suffer. I promise no life support. I promise I won't let you lay there with tubes coming out of you.
As I watched her sleep - at least I hoped she was sleeping - I looked at all the tubes. And I thought about broken promises, and the phone call. "You have power of attorney, will you consent to surgery? Without surgery, she will not survive the night." My brother, who was there with her, pleaded for her life. And so I consented, against the thousand promises, against my better judgment.
It was harder than I thought.
My siblings and I fought over feeding tubes and respirators and extra measures and what she wanted and what she didn't want, over medical care and nursing homes. Over life and death. Because one did not have the heart to stop treatment and another did not have
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Learning to Love
By Rebekah Henson»
My parents made friends with a toll taker on the Betsy Ross bridge. The relationship began in 2007, when I was in college and my mother was in the hospital with a lesion on her lung the week before Thanksgiving. That November was the scariest month of my life. She was in her early 60s, and when you're a 20-something in college and your parents are in their 60s, you can't help but devote a few hours a week to wondering what might happen if their vices or genetics get the best of them before they watch you graduate college. My Mom's surgery day was the worst, especially when my Dad didn't call, as he had promised, to tell me that everything was all right.
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Creating the New City: Part Four
Being an Adult
By Jody Bowden»
Being an adult with a capital "A" is hard. But, I had settled into that role, albeit begrudgingly, over the past 10 years or so. Along with my husband, we budgeted, found stable decent-paying jobs, paid off student loans, paid taxes, and acted like grown-ups most of the time. Buying a house, getting married, first baby, second baby, third baby, selling our first house and buying our second (bigger) house, getting a dog... Yes, we were adults. Life had a predictable pace; never a dull moment with three kids in the house, but things were good. Still, nothing in my adulthood could have prepared me for hearing the words "you have cancer" when I was just 35 years old. It was one of those moments that become frozen in time,
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My Mutter Moments
By Kathryn A. Kopple»
In my teens, I suffered a grand mal seizure, an eruption that felt like the cranial version of Krakatoa. Later, in college, I awoke with a painful lump on my tailbone, near the cleft of my buttocks. It turned out of be a pilonidal cyst. The term "pilonidal," in Latin, means "a nest of hair," which is the common trait of these bizarre tumors. In 2001, an excruciating cramp on my right side sent me to the emergency room. Scans showed a growth of some sort, and with the ominous news that it might be ovarian cancer, I went under the knife. After the operation, my physician told me that I was lucky, as it turned out to be a dermoid cyst, a benign but freakish tumor that sprouts hair, bone, thyroid glands, teeth--you name it. More recently, in 2010, I woke to find a large bald spot on my scalp. The diagnosis: alopecia areata. A
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