sea salt

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...