Tag: medical parenting
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The Backpack
Should I keep this? Marie Kondo whispered, “Tidy up!” in my ear as I studied the small, missile-shaped backpack. There were a few tears along the bottom, a grommet was missing. A long-forgotten zip-tie still prevented worn zipper from falling open and allowing the heavy oxygen tank inside to tumble out and put a…
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Better, Lighter, Stronger: A Tale of Hope
My eyes were as big as the moon when the orderly wheeled in the new Bipap machine for the Baby. The machine looked like someone had told a child, ‘Draw a Transformer with no arms and octopus feet with wheels and a heavy boxy head with a screen face’ and then brought it to life.…
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Captain’s Log: Baby’s First Flight
Tuesday, 7/11/2023, Nashville Airport 2:08 pm I wasn’t anxious about this until we popped open the back of my sister’s van. It’s not the actual flying that concerns me. The Baby is almost chronically un-anxious, as in, he is not anxious even when he probably should be, like when he tries to drown himself by…
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Groundhog Day
Life has felt oppressively the same lately. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s doing comparatively well. No one is seizing tens of times a day and losing critical developmental skills like sand in a sand timer or telling their sweet, first-year 5th-grade teacher to “Suck my mother fucking dick”. So…comparatively well. My friend Rachel said she…
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Plan G
Recently, my sister was telling me about her first Reiki massage, where the guy waved his hands around to clear her energy. Near the end, he basically pushed his fist into her stomach until he stroked her spine, told her that she didn’t need to be a people pleaser anymore, and then left the room,…
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Behold, My Sister Wife
I have several distinct memories of observing parents whose kids had nurses in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Sometimes we would get caught on the elevator with them, other times they would make their grand entrance into the waiting room- a parent or two followed by a kid in a wheelchair with a…
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The Good Doctor
The Baby turned five this week. It’s crazy. All of those five years tend to blur together. After all, time flies when you’re drowning in medical chaos (just kidding…kind of). On the night of his birthday, our dinner conversation centered around remembering all of his firsts- the first time he sat up, the first solid…
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The Honeysuckle Vine
The other morning, The Kid and I were on our morning walk with Baby and dog in tow. The dog had stopped to poop so The Baby and I paused on the sidewalk in one of the Top Three Most Interesting Yards on our street. For some reason, three artsy hippy families bought houses in…
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Girl, Interrupted
During this quarantine, I’ve been doing this app called 1 Second Everyday, where you basically create a video montage over a period of time made up of, you guessed it, a video clip of 1 second from each day. The Kid, who is a perpetual optimist and doesn’t want to think about or remember anything…