sea salt

I gently pushed her body forward and let go, watching her legs and head submerge in the water briefly before she rose to the top of the water and swam to the wall, her strong, determined limbs pulling and pushing the water every which way. She was swimming . My not-yet-4-year-old daughter was actually swimming, and I watched her, astonished, understanding perfectly how this came to be and yet not fully accepting it was possible. We had started swim lessons when she was just a baby holding on to me while the swim instructor gently splashed the babies and sang "The Wheels on the Bus." She'd moved up and up through the levels, gaining strength and confidence, and one day, in a pool surrounded by older kids, she just swam away . It was what she was supposed to do, what I wanted her to do, what I had encouraged and guided and paid for her to do. But watching the bottoms of her feet kicking unruly waves of water in her wake, it seemed all wrong somehow. * My parents, at ag...

It was a perfect moment. Comically, almost embarrassingly perfect: the sun fading behind the pine trees, casting a glow on my daughter's head as she swung up and down. I pushed her higher and higher, at her request, my hands gently pressing into the back of her little white t-shirt covered with hearts, her sparkly red skirt glinting with the sunlight, her still-uncut baby curls rising and falling with each push. I looked around at our lush green lawn, our white fence, our brown dog resting in the last slivers of sunlight. I hadn't make extraordinary choices in life, and yet here I was, surrounded by such goodness, my daughter's squeals of delight rising and disappearing into the air like vapor. * A couple hours earlier, I'd been talking to my mom on the phone. She and my dad were preparing to pick up their first foster child that evening, an elementary aged boy who did not know his house was unsafe. How he and my parents would respond to each other was unknown, as ...

We handed her a Styrofoam cup of Methodone, to help with the withdrawal symptoms. By her medical record, I knew she was young. She smiled. She thanked us. The light behind her eyes was dimming but you could still see a flicker. We gave her a sandwich and a container of apple juice while the doctor examined her hand. The infection looked better, he said, and the plan was to give antibiotics and send her back to the part of the hospital she'd come from. Her skin was red, swollen, dry--infected from where she'd inserted a needle--and while receiving antibiotics through a vein in her arm, she'd used the access to put more drugs in, which had landed her back in our care in the ER. Her pain was cyclical. Her sickness devastating. Her demeanor so calm, so grateful for care. After every interaction, she smiled and said thank you. When the antibiotics finished dripping into her arm, she was wheeled away. * I was spending my clinical day in the ER, a rare and special assignm...

"So as long as he has oxygen, his heart will function on its own? He doesn't need a pacemaker?" "Right," my instructor responded. "The brain tells the lungs to breathe, but it doesn't tell the heart to beat. Remember the heart has its own electrical conduction system." I nodded. I did remember, as we were knee-deep in cardiology at school. 6 students, our instructor, and two nurses were crowded around a patient's bed. His chest rose and fell rhythmically, and his telemetry monitor showed a steady, healthy heartbeat. His skin was warm and even-toned, exactly what nurses want to see, since this indicates good blood circulation, which means the heart is doing its job, which means it's getting the oxygen it needs. We took turns listening to his heart sounds with our stethoscopes--a strong, healthy pattern of  lub dub  lub dub  lub dub.  He'd been declared brain dead a couple days before, his breathing the work of a ventilator ne...

I have been on my Christmas break for roughly 10 days, and have already read two books, the kind I like best: nonfiction, sad, challenging.  Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved  by Kate Bowler and  The Middle Place  by Kelly Corrigan are both memoirs by women in their 30s (like me), with young children (like me), who were diagnosed with cancer (please please never like me please). They write beautifully about their journeys: knowing something was wrong, receiving a diagnosis, rounds upon rounds of chemo, tentatively celebrating the next clean scan. But the most searing part of each book was how these mothers wrote about their children. The tantrums over who hit who, the snuggling up with books before bed, the strewn about toys just waiting to be stepped on, the magical way that children see time, the devastation of knowing how much will be missed if cancer wins. Selfless maternal love wishes desperately that Jolene will not become a ch...