knowledge at your tips
By the second visit to the emergency room in three weeks, Priya’s husband finally said it out loud at the kitchen table in Austin. He could not keep doing this. Priya had been in weekly therapy for six months, on two psychiatric medications for four months, and she still spent most evenings curled on the … Read more
Desmond, a forty-one-year-old high school history teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, lost the central vision in both eyes to a rare retinal disease over the course of fourteen months. He kept teaching. He kept walking his daughter to the bus. What he could not keep doing was the thing he had done every Sunday for two … Read more
Three weeks into recovery, Reggie was sitting in his sister’s kitchen in Cincinnati when the pharmacy called. His monthly Vivitrol injection was approved, but the local CVS could not stock it. The pharmacist explained that Vivitrol is a specialty medication that ships from a designated specialty pharmacy, refrigerated, with a 48-hour delivery window, and his … Read more
Helen had lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Tucson, Arizona for eleven years after her husband died. Her companion through every one of those years was a small black poodle named Otto. When Otto was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma at thirteen and declined rapidly, Helen stayed up with him for the last seventy-two hours, hand-feeding … Read more
Reggie was nineteen, freshly out of foster care, and one course away from failing out of a community college outside Charlotte when his English instructor introduced him to a retired electrical engineer named Walter from a local Big Brothers Big Sisters affiliate that ran a young-adult program. Walter was sixty-eight, recently widowed, and had told … Read more
Marisol was making spaghetti when the trooper knocked on the door of her Albuquerque duplex. Her husband Daniel, a long-haul driver, had been killed two hours earlier when a wrong-way driver crossed the median on I-40. By 9 p.m., Marisol was on her kitchen floor, unable to move her legs, certain she was having a … Read more
Tasha was a Division I middle-distance runner at the University of Oregon, the kind of athlete whose senior season was supposed to end at the NCAA championships in Eugene. Instead, in March of her final year, an MRI showed a stress fracture in her sacrum that wouldn’t heal in time. The team doctor told her … Read more
Devon, a 52-year-old electrician in Cleveland, hadn’t sung anywhere except his shower since high school. After his divorce, his sister dragged him to a community choir rehearsal at a Methodist church basement on a Tuesday night, and he expected to leave at the break. He stayed three hours. The director, a former music teacher named … Read more
It was 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in Manhattan when Daniel’s wife called 911. He had been awake for three nights, convinced the upstairs neighbors had installed a listening device, and he had just emptied a kitchen drawer trying to find proof. The paramedics took him to Bellevue Hospital. Daniel’s wife, Iris, expected the kind … Read more
Reggie had been a paramedic in Phoenix for twenty-two years before the call that finally broke him. It was not, in the end, the worst call he had ever run. It was a routine cardiac arrest in a quiet neighborhood, an elderly man whose wife stood in the doorway and asked Reggie what she should … Read more