Having just written about the best doctor on the planet, here’s one that makes me all the more grateful to him, given the contrast between the two.

Twenty-three years ago today, I picked up the phone and asked the nurse which doctor was on call today.

Mind you, I had never said a word to anybody there about how I did not like one of the partners, but she shot the question at me, “Why? If it’s the wrong one, are you going to go out of labor?” I hadn’t even said I was in labor, but I hesitated, and then answered truthfully, because, well–it was the truth! “Yes.”

And that is why my son missed being born on my father’s birthday yesterday. Sorry, Dad. The wrong one had been on duty the night before.

That one–okay, there’s this medical axiom: if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. So when I told this OB that I was experiencing episodes of near-fainting, he decided that well, obviously, with a history of familial diabetes, I had gestational diabetes. Horses. He sent me to a nutritionist, who put me on an exceedingly strict diet and had me return to her once a week with a chart documenting every single mouthful. It was not fun, but I did it, and was proud of myself for sticking to it.

I told that doctor that I was following all those instructions, but I was still having those episodes. He questioned me: was I really following it? Yes.

And then he told me flat out to my face that I was lying.

He did not once actually check my blood sugar. He did not once do a urinalysis. He did not once pay attention to my blood pressure readings, which were very low (and would, much later, grow into full-blown dysautonomia). He did not once order a glucose tolerance test. This is just what he’d seen, over and over, this is what I must have, and anything to the contrary wasn’t believable to him.

And that is why my son was born the day he went off duty. I can be stubborn that way.

Okay, enough of the kvetching. Read on to the next post about the doctor who made a tremendous difference; that one’s far more important. Except for the real point of writing this one, before the zebra carried me off on a tangent: happy birthday, kiddo!

(P.S.: Some kids, when they leave home, their moms take over their rooms. This household, I take over their bathroom. No contact solution here, nothing to see, move along, move along.)

I wrote the following as a comment yesterday on the blog of a doctor who was talking about the headline of the day. I lived this, I wrote this, I own this, and I decided I wanted it here, too. This is not to downplay the importance of my family nor the nurses at Stanford four years ago, but this was a crucial moment that changed everything. Everything–writing this blog, my site, my book, my patterns, my other manuscripts, the things I’ve knitted, the things I’ve given, everything I’ve done of myself in the last four years, not to mention getting to watch my two youngest graduate from high school and go on–came from what happened that day.

Quality of life has zero to do with what you can physically accomplish. It has everything to do with how much you are able to give and receive love. The end of life is a time that can bring great healing and a lifetime of comfort between a patient and those around them--or not. When people get upset that their loved ones are suffering, what they don't realize is that what they're really upset about is that *they're* suffering, having to watch it happen. They're empathetic, and caring, and mean the best, but they don't have the blessing of having to directly and personally experience the failures of the body in the process, where there's this sense of great triumph simply in being alive the next day, still with your loved ones, no matter how crummy you feel.

I write this as someone who was once dying in a hospital bed--and my doctor walked in in the middle. I looked up at that kind, deeply compassionate man, and knew that he would blame himself for the rest of his life if I didn't make it. I couldn't do that to him. I had to pull through. Breathing through that night was the hardest thing I have ever done, but I did it. Because I was loved, not only by my family, but by someone whose needs transcended my own to me in those particular circumstances--because that good man loved a patient he didn't even know well.

And THAT is quality of life.

Only in Santa Cruz.

We had a friend graduate from a school teaching traditional Chinese medicine, and the ceremonies were held yesterday afternoon at a beautiful old assembly hall a block or two from the school.

That it was to be in Santa Cruz, we knew. What we weren’t expecting was that it was upstairs in the building at the end of the kitschy old boardwalk in Santa Cruz. The noise from below was well muffled, except for the incessant vibrations at our feet from the busy arcade on the ground floor.

Yet such a grand old place. The carpeting was an endless look-at-me swirling pattern that so much reminded me of the matching dark red and gold one in the luxury apartment my grandparents had had in Washington, DC when I was growing up. That same old elegance. There was a huge mirror above the long, steep staircase, with a poster in the middle of it with a list of the Big Bands that had performed there between 1931 and 1964: Benny Goodman. Artie Shaw. Merv Griffin (Merv Griffin? I had to go look him up later. Huh. Learn something new.) The assembly room was like the forward portion of a boat, with a curved line of windows looking out on the beach, the seagulls floating on air right in front of us, the fog rolling in, the waves coming towards us, the sunbathers below, although you had to go right up to the windows to see straight enough down to see them. The sailboats were bobbing gently in the water, some close, some stretched further on out. Such a peaceful view. I understood why they’d chosen the place.

And then, the ceremony: native Chinese medical teachers mixed with one from Sweden and a few others, traditional Chinese pronouncements of the meanings and elements of the earth, then greeting each graduate with a hug, American style. I loved it.

I had asked my friend whether it would be okay to knit during the proceedings? She, a knitter herself, said, sure! While lamenting that she herself had probably better not. So I did, and when it got to where I probably wouldn’t have time to finish another long row on my shawl project, not wanting to stop mid-row, I reached for a new ball of yarn and needles and began a scarf that I could put aside more quickly: on bamboo yarn. Glancing at my stash that morning, I’d thought, what could fit the day more perfectly?

As we left afterwards, I had to laugh: we came out the door at the bottom beneath the very pink wall you’ll see if you look at the Wikipedia entry on the place. Picture the beach goers, the Santa Cruz free spirits, and us: my 6’8″ husband with his tall hat to try to keep the family skin cancer away, white Oxford shirt, dark wool dress pants, and me in my Sunday best, a blouse and linen skirt with a pink circular lace shawl on. I’m sure we looked almost Amish by comparison. We were somebody else’s weird California look-and-point. It was suddenly very funny. Only in Santa Cruz! We fit right in.

I did the most mundane of tasks the other day: I called in a prescription refill on my meds.

One of them had expired, needed an okay from the doctor, and wasn’t ready when we picked up the rest. Nuts. It would need its own trip. It seemed kind of a waste.

And then, for no reason I could have told anyone, I didn’t get around to going all week. I just didn’t feel like it. Today I looked at the fact that it was Friday, that the clinic’s pharmacy closes for the weekend at 12:30 Saturday afternoons, that it was going to be closed Monday for the holiday, and, hey, I’d better get a move on already. I headed out the door.

And wondered, as I went along, if I would run into anybody I knew. It’s a big enough clinic that I fairly often do.

I go to the local lupus support group to try to show those struggling with a new diagnosis that life does go on, that you can be cheerful still, that you adjust and find you’re still yourself and still just as capable of being happy: I try to be who I needed someone to be for me 17 years ago.

There was one time, probably two years ago, that a woman showed up who just couldn’t hear a message like that, absolutely not, not yet and maybe not ever. She was sure she was too close to death to make any plans for any kind of a future, she despaired of having any chance of seeing her children grow up, and she was as depressed a person as I’ve met in a long time. This was no time for being chipper, this was a crying need for someone who understood–and every one of us there tried to be that for her. Every one of us had, on some level at some point, gone through that same uncertainty and struggle, if not as deep, still, enough to know. And several of us had gone through episodes where life was in the balance, and knew the power of knowing someone was there for us through the worst.

I have to say that for all the best intentions on my part, I think I was the person she least related to. Much though I would have wanted to do better than that. I was too successful at what I wanted out of my life.

As they were ringing up my prescription at the counter today, I happened to glance behind me and see who was waiting next for theirs. It took me a moment–it was her! I smiled; she seemed to have no idea who I was, and ignored me.

The next clerk motioned her over. She was waiting for them to get her meds when I finished; I walked behind her and softly called her name, not entirely sure I remembered it correctly. There was a moment’s hesitation on her part, and then she turned to see who on earth? I re-introduced myself as being from the lupus group, and now she remembered me: ah, yes. Okay. I asked her how she was doing; she sighed, gave a small smile, and said, well, she was here every Wednesday and Friday.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” I said sympathetically.

She looked me steadily in the eyes, and answered calmly, “Beats the alternative.” And then was clearly glad to see me laugh ruefully, gently–whereas once she might well have taken offense at that, might have thought it meant I didn’t really understand the depths of her pain.

Oh, I do.

I had hoped against hope back then that at that meeting she had simply let the worst of her fears vent, that it wasn’t really that bad, day-to-day, for her. But I didn’t know. I hoped we’d done some good in hearing her out. But I didn’t know. And then we didn’t see her again.

And I didn’t know.

And now I know. Whether we played any part or not, now I know that she did indeed begin to cope.

Today she got a chance to show a member of that group that had seen her at her lowest point that she, too, was continuing on now. That she, too, could smile now.

I don’t know if she’ll come back and give us another chance to befriend her.

I do know, today, she helped me. So few words were spoken, but so much was conveyed. She would be all right after all, come what may.

When I got home, I walked into the bathroom under the skylight and noticed that my amaryllis’s bud, which is still growing upwards, had started leaning to one side, so I turned the pot to even it out in its trajectory towards the light. And found, on the other side–I told you God is a poet!–what I never, ever would have guessed. Surprise!

A second bud.

I am emphatically not a morning person. But my daughter had an early flight out, and Oakland Airport isn’t far enough away from the MacArthur Maze, which recently made the news when a double-tanker gas truck crashed, exploded, and melted two layers of freeway ramps; we had no idea how much extra time we had to allow for with that mess.

Turned out, there was a major backup starting just ahead of where we got off 880 for the airport, and the three of us made good time after all. But it was way too early in the day, and all I wanted to do after waving goodbye was to go home and crawl back into bed.

Just as we got past the Dunbarton Bridge over the San Francisco Bay, I, in the passenger seat of our Prius, happened to glance up at the driver next to us, riding high in a large white pickup. He was watching the road but glancing repeatedly past us at the salt marshes alongside the roadway there: it wasn’t much past sunrise, and the sky and the marsh were beautiful. Shore birds were flying, it was a new day, and that man had the biggest smile on his face.

Without even knowing it or being aware of me, he was showing me what he saw, so I could see too.

Nicholas’s dad sent a link to photos of what had happened. There was one showing his wife gently holding their son’s hand, with his fingers curled towards his mother’s, as the rescuers worked on him.

When I was in critical condition at Stanford four years ago, when they were infusing me with a then-experimental med that would either finish me off or save my life, they had every vital sign being monitored, and my blood pressure fell to 64/44 and was headed down. A nurse looked at the monitor and noticed. She reached for me and held me with one hand, saying, “You okay? Hang in there, honey.” She quickly snapped out orders to the other nurse (there may have been two others, it gets a bit blurry at this point) while she held onto me, never letting go. She never knew how much she was keeping me here by that simple touch and those words. She had no idea how strong an effect it had on me, how much I held onto it as my life raft.

I saw that picture of those two people I love and their hands together as that child lay in that snow under that ski lift.

And used my hands to work on a matching hat for the little brother whose big brother fell such an unbelievable fall. *I* needed to hold them gently, too.

I went off to the knitting group at Purlescence Thursday night; when I was there two weeks ago, one of the owners had just gone into the hospital. Last night, after she’d had a five-day stay that had involved IV antibiotics and all kinds of fun stuff, she was there at the store (yay!), back where she belonged. Thank goodness.

For those who remember the post about Noel at Stanford, I know how much you need to laugh to keep your sanity in the face of the sorts of things she’d just gone through. A few side comments from me, such as, “They flushed the IVs with saline?” was all she needed to hear to know that someone had a good idea of what it had all been like. It helped. Then, to keep things on a lighter side, I told the tale of mooning the Lifeflight chopper, and of my roommate who absolutely could not sleep unless the TV was on, which was of course on a platform well above the curtain dividing the room. I pleaded with the nurses: She’s asleep now! Can’t you turn that thing off? No, she has the right to have it on (but they did turn off the sound.) Picture a bunch of interrogators randomly flashing bright lights directly in your eyeballs all night–oh joy.

The night nurse, without turning on the lights, told me that maybe she had a solution. She went out of the room for a moment, came back, and I felt rubber bands being placed behind my ears and something soft going across my face. Okay, whatever. It’s dark, that’s all I care.

I was beyond exhausted, and slept completely through the mostly-male doctors’ rounds in the morning. And woke up to find…a feminine pad across my face.

I bet the chopper pilot put her up to it.

So we all laughed over that, a good time was had by all, and then I came home.

…And walked in the door to the accusation, “You forgot your phone.”

I did?

“Yes!”

Okay, you know if this was an issue something happened. What?

Platelets at 10. Five units in the hospital.

Our daughter with ITP got to go home that night, late, and is now much better.

I got her permission to post this thank you to every person who has ever volunteered as a blood donor. I owe you my daughter’s life.

When my husband was considering a job offer in California, the offer letter solemnly promised, “No home delivery of snow.” Right there, in writing, with the added note saying, “and if you think you do see some, go back to bed for an hour. It’s just an illusion. It will be gone.”

We had 70″ of snow in two and a half weeks right before we moved out of New Hampshire 20 years ago, and they got hit with 15″ more the day after we left.

My friend Leanne lived around the corner from us in a cul-de-sac. Right after our development was built, the town of Merrimack banned builders from creating any more cul-de-sacs, for the very reason Leanne got stuck with: the snowplows would go through hers, pushing all the snow off the road from that big circle, piling it up and up and up and finally depositing it across the fronts of everybody’s yards and driveways.

I used to racewalk every morning for four to five miles before my small children woke up, time to exercise, time to myself, time to wave hi at the neighbors without distractions. So I got to see what it was like for Leanne.

Picture a Cape Cod saltbox, two stories high with a small front yard so the house was near to the road, that, standing in the street near the house, you could not see that house for the height of the snowbank in front of it.

Now, picture a mom with three kids under four years old, including a small baby. A husband stuck overseas on business on a work assignment that was only supposed to be for a few days, but that had ground on into several weeks. Now picture all that snow. What are you going to do? Do you take your babies outside in that weather for the amount of time it’s going to take to shovel that whole driveway and That Pile all by yourself? How do you have any energy for your children afterwards? Do you leave them inside, unattended, for all that time? Do you slip out when they’re napping, hoping they don’t wake up, that the baby doesn’t decide it’s hungry when you can’t hear it, yadda yadda. What do you do?

My own husband used to travel a lot, and issues like these helped contribute to our decision to take the job in California. Our last child, born here, was the first pregnancy where I didn’t have to push my Toyota out from being stuck in the snow–by myself!–in that condition.

The biggest blast of that three-week off-and-ongoing snowstorm happened on a Saturday night. Leanne, like me, is a Mormon. She had a home teacher from church who had young teenage sons–and Mike looked at that brewing storm and knew from his own family’s experiences when his kids had been younger that Leanne was going to need help.

So: without saying anything. He and the boys got up early enough Sunday morning to dig their own car out, and then they headed over to Leanne’s. The snowplow had gone through, and the heavy, densely-compacted pile across the bottom of her driveway–never mind tackling the rest of the driveway–towered very much above their heads. They took their snowshovels and had at it.

Which means that when Leanne woke up that morning, expecting yet more snowboundedness on the one day of the week she could otherwise have had some actual adult company, some relief to help keep her sanity, some support while her husband was stuck in Singapore and unable to help, she saw–

–a clear path out all ready to go. Be our guest. Happy Sunday. See you at church.

And that, ever since, has been the story I’ve wanted to live up to of what true service to another person can really be about.

I wrote another note re roses last night, while giving my hands a rest from knitting and being too wired from all the Scharffenberger chocolate to sleep:

When I was in college, I was dating an older fellow with whom I was supremely incompatible but whom I was, for awhile, in love with, and who very much wanted to settle down and marry me. Meantime, my old friend Richard, whom I’d known since I was a week old, was off to France on a mission for the Mormon Church.

Come summertime, his two years being up, Richard came home. There was a large party held for the twenty-something young adults in the area, and we all came. So it was that I ran into my old high-school buddy–we’d never dated, we’d been good friends, more akin to siblings than anything else–and I took one look at the guy I’d been dating right there, and I simply knew that that was that. He just didn’t measure up. It was over. It didn’t occur to me that I’d someday get to marry Richard, just, I knew I had to marry someone as good as him.

It wasn’t too long after that that Richard asked me out on our first actual date. It felt so much better being with him than George: with Richard, I wasn’t careening from wild highs to low lows, I was simply home. Eventually, he proposed; it felt so wonderful to say yes.

Word got out–I don’t know how, ’twasn’t me–to the first guy that I was engaged. He showed up at my doorstep. With (oh goodness) a dozen red roses, supposedly as a congratulations on my happiness. Can you say awkward!? Mercifully, he simply left quickly after thrusting them into my stunned hands at my door.

Richard showed up less than an hour later. I was living in an apartment with three other single women; he looked from the doorway to the kitchen table, and asked, curious, whose roses those were?

“Mine…” I was beyond chagrinned.

“Who gave them to you?” It certainly made no sense to him. It made no sense to me either!

(Oh man what do I do with this!?) “George…”

“‘Scuse me a moment.” And with that, he spun on his heels and disappeared. I had no idea what he was going to do nor what to say. He reappeared not too long after, with One. Single. Rose. The very longest long-stemmed red rose I had ever laid eyes on in my life. It was big, and it was in direct contrast to the bunch that had so many littler ones crammed together into that vase, a crowd noisily vying for attention all at once. Richard’s single rose had presence, it had self-confidence, and it was from the man who knew he had my full heart.

So I occasionally razz him gently about the big bunches of red roses at Valentine’s; one will always do it, for me.

But I’ve also learned, however he wants to celebrate it, let him do it his way. He knows what he’s doing. He always has.

My camera and my computer are not currently on speaking terms, so I’m afraid knitting pictures are temporarily on hold.

I got an email yesterday, one of those things that gets forwarded around the Internet, a poem from a “Crabby Old Man” that had been found in the man’s pocket after he’d died in a hospital in Florida, rebuking the nurses for only seeing an uncooperative patient who didn’t want to eat that food–because he still wanted to be able to make choices. Who didn’t comply over various other things, either, wanting to be seen as a human being, and warning them that they, too, would be old someday. I read it, understood why the nurses were touched and passed it around, but thought, oh, but he could have had such a different experience!

One more story about that trip to Urgent Care last summer: the IV that a young nurse put in was done painfully (okay, so they never exactly feel wonderful.) I had two IVs running at a time for eight days, with many a blown vein, before I got a central line installed while I was at Stanford in ’03, and feel I know a bit on the subject now. But hey; this nurse had tried her best. I wanted to introduce her to Rachel Remen, because Dr. Remen writes of the time she, while in training, was basically handed needles and told to go draw blood out of a hospital ward full of patients. She had no idea what she was doing, and she knew she had no idea what she was doing. Finally, a large gruff patient on the ward who totally intimidated her exclaimed, “Don’t they teach these kids anything!?” And he took her around, patient to patient, showing her how to draw blood out of any kind of vein, easy or hard, with such finesse that she says that she as a professor has now taught thousands what he taught her that day–and that there have been times where that skill has saved a life.

Her story has a powerful surprise ending that I won’t spoil; go read her “My Grandfather’s Blessings” and “Kitchen Table Wisdom” books, they’re powerful reading.

So. There I was, with that IV in Urgent Care, and a couple of hours later another nurse goes to check it. He’s big, he’s gruff, and he shoots a glance towards the other medical personnel across the ward, grumbling, “Don’t they teach these kids anything? Look at that IV!” Grr… and he goes to fix it as best he can, annoyed at it, annoyed at himself for grumbling out loud, annoyed at everything, it seemed to me.

And I looked up at him, and thought, You have never seen me before in your life. You are unhappy because you don’t want me to be suffering any more than I have to. You are acting gruff because I, a stranger, matter to you, and you don’t want me to be in any pain I don’t have to be in.

I managed to voice a quiet “Thank you” that surprised him, and he looked at me, then. And saw me looking into his eyes hoping that he would see how much I meant that thank you. How much I hoped that he, too, would be in less pain.

He saw. A look of wonder passed his face. He instantly softened, and he let the gruffness go. He saw. I wonder now how he is, and I hope he sees all the time now.

I woke up this morning, yawned, stretched… Hey! Did it again. Not the slightest hint of tremor. For the first time since early September. None.

My old band with four turquoise stones lives a happy life in my imagination, wherever it may have turned up in real life. It’s a symbol of someone’s undying love, it’s a circle of happiness, it’s a gift between hearts…

…It’s good and lost. But I have lived long enough to know that the end of its story with me is not the end of its story, and there’s this odd happy anticipation mixed with the loss in what that could mean. I can half-picture myself (almost) writing to the San Rafael and San Jose police departments that, should it show up at their station, to please let the honest person who made that effort have it as a thank you from me, and send them my best wishes.

I googled turquoise when it disappeared, and found that turquoise tends to form in dry places in the world, that it is formed when water runs over copper and aluminum; that it rarely ever forms crystals, and that that means it’s often as fragile as window glass.

Gee, if only I’d known, years ago when we lived in New Hampshire. Where the bathtub turned bright turquoise blue within a week from the effects of acid rain on the copper pipes. I could have put an aluminum pot under the faucet and been harvesting my own gems in no time!

The doctors at Stanford never did figure out what was going on with this whole shaking/seizure thing. I came home from the hospital craving apricots; opened a three-pound bag from Costco, ate quite a few over several weeks, a random fact that for some reason I remembered. My shaking episodes improved greatly, and I put it down to the increasing passing of time since a late-summer bout of pneumonia that had triggered a lupus flare.

Two doctors I saw after I got out wondered out loud if it could have been a potassium or magnesium deficiency–but why, there’s no reason I would have that.

Last week I called my doctor after reading an article in Newsweek. Suddenly I’d found my eyes flipping to the same spot on the opposite page, which turned out to be one of those all-the-fine-print pages on the backside of a drug ad. Right to where it warned, in capital letters, DO NOT take this with drug x. Put together, they can crash your potassium levels. OH. I was taking drug x and a large dose of the advertised one at night and a smaller dose by day. That would explain why it was worse at night, too…

Potassium. They said… I looked it up. For muscle contraction and to relay nerve impulses. Hey! Dried apricots have over three times the potassium levels of bananas; they were the number one food on that chart. HEY!

My doctor immediately took me off the problematic drug. I ate a lot more apricots. That drug interaction had taken three years to build up to the point that nobody could ignore it, and it may be that it will take awhile to go all the way back down again: but so far today so good, for the first time.

My generous sweetie got me Sea Silk yarn to celebrate the day today, just because he knew how much I liked playing with the stuff.

And a new turquoise and silver ring, made by hand by Native Americans, as the old one had been, because he knew that that would make me happy. Honoring the craftsman, honoring each other. Silver, needing polish and attention to keep shining bright. I like that.

My dysautonomia had not progressed to fatal Multiple System Atrophy after all. It was all just an easily-correctable medication problem. And the attending physician I got to meet at Stanford loves his wife’s lace scarf out of hand-dyed Lisa Souza yarn.

I will live as forever as everybody else. I have beaten the odds yet again.

I have my sweetie who loves me, four children who are the best any parent could ever ask for, and a new ring and new yarn just for the fun of it. Let me hold still while he puts it on my hand.

Turn on the stereo.

Happy birthday to me.

!!!ROCK ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Pictures later, gotta run…)

Anne and Mary Anne asked about my meeting Rachel Remen. Here’s the story.

Dr. Remen did a booksigning at Kepler’s, a large independent bookstore that is a local institution. I love her “Kitchen Table Wisdom” and her “My Grandfather’s Blessings,” and made a point of going to hear her. This was a little after “Grandfather’s” was released.

She talked a bit, she read from “Grandfather’s” a bit, and then she asked the large crowd for any questions or comments. One woman told her how much she’d enjoyed the books; the next one went on and on about saving the planet, imploring Dr. Remen to write about the dire condition of the earth. Dr. Remen heard her out, then gently said that this was clearly this woman’s passion and that the questioner would do well to write the book she had in mind herself for what she could bring to it.

Then she said she had time for one more question. There were a lot of people and many hands went up. I was about a third of the way back in the crowd, and thought, she’ll never call on me. I can only wish. I raised my hand, but only barely; I wasn’t sure she could even see that I did.

There was what I can only describe as a sense of white light that somehow passed between us as she looked in my direction and called on me anyway.

Like the others had done, at her invitation I stood to ask my question. I tried not to make it too long. I told her:

I have lupus. I also have a hearing loss. I have an ear doctor who discovered that the cause of my growing loss was a severe reaction to aspirin, and I quit taking any and the progression of the loss stopped.

Ten years later, I developed Crohn’s disease (something I knew Dr. Remen could definitely relate to.) I was put on a med that, with my history, put my hearing at risk, and I got sent back to that ENT for testing.

He walked into the examining room at the edge of tears, and asked me, “WHY are YOU!! being put on ototoxic drugs!”

I explained that I had Crohn’s now. He stood there a moment, taking it in, and affirmed, “That’s bad.” Another breath. “But…*I* thought you had breast cancer, or lymphoma, or…” as he shook his head, grieving at the loss.

(I didn’t say to Dr. Remen that I have a Daniel Wallace lupus book that says that 80% of lupus patients whose intestines start bleeding die in the first episode.)

I had walked into his room with a heavy burden, and that good man lifted it right off me by his empathy. I walked out with the weight of the world gone. He had heard me, he had been there for me, and he had remembered the cause of my hearing loss–ten years later! I wasn’t just another face passing through, it was important to him that I be okay. He remembered! It felt like my life expectancy was being stretched forward right there in front of me in those moments.

I wanted some way of telling that good man what he had done for me. How much it had meant to me. I knit, I told Dr. Remen–and here I held up a gossamer-fine lace shawl I was working on, by way of show-and-tell–and after reading your book, I knew what I wanted to do. I knit his wife a wedding ring shawl, one that can pass through a ring (again, the one in my hands demo’d) as a way of conveying how grateful I was.

(Note to my readers here: this was when I was new at knitting any kind of lace, much less of that fineness, and had never considered giving all those weeks of work away to anyone other than immediate family.)

I told Dr. Remen, “I did not know what to do or how to say thank you till I read your book. You gave me my voice.”

And then I sat down, as the room exploded in clapping.