Summary:

A thirty-five year old English professor (and brilliant writer) diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease) is told he has less than five years to live. Nine years later he publishes a series of 12 personal essays that chronicle his remarkable journey from diagnosis ("Getting Up in the Morning") to being mindful, "cultivating the eternal present" ("Living at the Edge"). He shares with us the interim of conundrums, spirituality, and the quotidian by reflecting on his New Hampshire life: Unfinished Houses, Wild Things, Mud Season, Winter Mind.

In almost every essay Simmons reflects on the rewards of "mystical seeing". We all have "within us this capacity for wonder, this ability to break the bonds of ordinary awareness and sense that though our lives are fleeting and transitory, we are part of something larger, eternal and unchanging." (p. 152) "Most of us have found that a line of poetry or scripture, a passage of music, the turning of a leaf in sunlight, or the sight of a child splashing in a stream can suddenly become a doorway through which, as William James writes, ’the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, steals into our hearts and thrills them.’" (p. 101)

View full annotation

Summary:

A woman's profile occupies the foreground of this computer-generated image. She is depicted from the base of her neck up to near the top of her head. A blue device protrudes from her neck, and a small section of a ridged tube, presumably connected to the blue device, occupies the bottom right-hand corner of the image. The device is a tracheal breathing tube, shown in the online photograph of the artist that accompanies the image. Worsham suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

The lady in the artwork wears a polka dot blouse and a vibrantly patterned hat. Her eyes look directly forward, as though oblivious to the onlookers in the image's background, and her mouth hangs agape. She wears lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge.

A young boy's face with big eyes, rosy cheeks, and brown hair looks impudently at the woman from the lower right half of the image; his mouth holds a slightly upturned grin. Behind the boy and occupying the background stands a woman whose green eyes stare at the disabled lady's profile. The staring lady has long light brown hair and she wears lipstick, makeup, a purple kerchief, and a green dress. Partially separating the boy and the woman from the disabled lady is a thin band of blue background - presumably sky - that cuts down through the center, albeit the background, of the image.

A dull green border of blocks frames the scene. Each corner is decorated with a red heart, the points of which angle into the center of the image. Big block letters inscribe the artwork's title: the top of the frame reads "HEAD," the bottom reads "TURNER."

View full annotation

Summary:

In the foreground, staring directly at the viewer, white tears visible on her cheeks, the artist lies immobile in a four poster hospital bed, only her head visible above the white sheet covering that is decorated with pale, pastel circles of cells or microscopic organisms.  The towering wooden oak easel that held her canvases, allowing Frida to paint when ill, is now the structure supporting a funnel of physical and emotional preoccupations erupting as vomit from her mouth: fish heads, dead chicken carcasses and fowl entrails, and skull inscribed with her name.  The background is a barren, parched and cracked desert.  The solitary objects in the sky, a moon and red-orange rimmed sun, suggest being trapped eternally, day and night, in this state, "Without Hope" --the painting's title. On the back of the painting Kahlo wrote, "Not the least hope remains to me....Everything moves in tune with what the belly contains."  [Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: HarperPerennial) 2002, p. 187]

View full annotation

Summary:

Robin Carr, a Torontonian in her mid-twenties, has serious inflammatory bowel disease, which by the end of the book has lead to twelve abdominal operations. The story begins as she anticipates further surgery to close her ostomy and create a pelvic pouch. Failure of the surgical procedure seems to bring about failure of her marriage. She is reminded of her father's own experience with an ostomy and his death of bowel cancer, as she establishes new relationships and grapples with her mortality and the possibility that she may never be able to have children.

View full annotation

Summary:

In 1917, the poet Siegfried Sassoon protests the war in a London newspaper. He is saved from court martial by a military friend who argues successfully for his transfer to the Craiglockhart War Hospital where he comes under the care of psychiatrist, William Rivers. Sassoon is not sick, but he and his doctor both know that the line between sanity and insanity is blurred, especially for a homosexual and in a time of war.

The other patients, however, are gravely wounded in spirit if not body; sometimes they are tormented by uncomprehending parents and wives. Rivers’ efforts to unravel their nightmares, revulsions, mutism, stammering, paralysis, and anorexia begin to shake his own psychic strength and lead him to doubt the rationality--if not the possibility--of restoring them to service. He yearns for his pre-war research in nerve regeneration, the quixotic enterprise that serves as a metaphor for his clinical work.

View full annotation

Summary:

This anthology of 38 autobiographical works by women with HIV/AIDS is edited by two women who are HIV positive. The introduction summarizes how the editors solicited writing or other expressions from HIV-positive women in order to publicly recognize the stories of women living with HIV/AIDS. Although most of the works are from Canada and the USA (including some from native populations), 12 other countries are also represented, including many African and European countries. Most of the pieces are prose, but poetry, art and photography are also included.

The pieces are very diverse and reflect multiple perspectives: activist, feminist, mother, teenager, drug addict, prostitute, lesbian, heterosexual, victim of abuse, etc. The stories are personal, introspective, direct and specific. Yet, throughout the anthology, universal themes of loneliness, isolation, hope, love and love lost recur.

View full annotation

Summary:

DeSalvo, a writer and biographer, relates her experiences with adult onset asthma. Because her symptom complex centers on coughing, rather than wheezing, there is a delay in diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Nine months after her symptoms begin, she reads an article about asthma and sees a pulmonologist who confirms the diagnosis.

The author details the many ways that her life has changed, the medications and precautions she must take, and mourns the loss of her earlier easy-breathing life. She is helped by a saint-like husband, open access to medical care and medication, and a compulsive avoidance of triggering agents.

As a writer interested in writers' lives, the author examines the effect that asthma had on the writing and lives of Marcel Proust, John Updike, Djuna Barnes, Olive Schreiner, Michael Ryan, and Elizabeth Bishop. Due to her own traumatic childhood (including being fondled in the bath) and her readings, the author concludes that "asthma is caused by terror, by trauma, by abuse (of a child, of the environment), by deprivation" and specifically that "asthma is a breathing disorder that is caused by abuse and that it is probably a manifestation of post-traumatic stress."

View full annotation

Summary:

The title and first line, "My Beautiful Grandmother / died ugly," set the tone for contrasts that continue throughout the poem: health and illness, beauty and ugliness, youth and age, life and death, staying and leaving. The poem initially describes the grandmother as aged, ready to die, anorexic and in such pain that she required six years of morphine. The needles used to inject medication, which left her arms bruised "black and blue" are contrasted with her previous embroidery needles, which she had used to stitch "pink cornucopias / on square after square of white cotton."

The grandmother was ready to die for a long time, to a place and time apart--to the mountains and to her spirited youth, when she was "dashing" and her "mind was as quick / as the stitch of a sparrow's wing." The poem continues with the compression of time yet marking the effects of time: old love letters to the grandmother crumble "like stale bread" in the hands of the granddaughter. The poem concludes with a short stanza alluding to difficulties that the granddaughter experienced leaving the Georgia town where her "beautiful grandmother stayed."

View full annotation

Summary:

This outstanding anthology of poems, stories, excerpts and essays by African-American writers is prefaced by a poem ("Aunt Sue’s Stories" by Langston Hughes), a foreword, two essays and an introduction. The book is then divided into three sections: Section I, Illness and Health-Seeking Behavior; Section II, Aging; and Section III, Loss and Grief.

Each section begins with an introduction which clarifies the choice of the section’s theme and briefly describes each piece. At the conclusion of each section is a list of ten to fifteen questions which "are intended for personal reflection and group discussion." Brief autobiographical information for each of the thirty-one authors is presented in Appendix 1.

As Secundy notes in the introduction, a divide exists between the health care worker and patient, which is particularly prominent when color and economic status are different between them. Secundy, as an educator in the medical humanities, selected pieces that reveal "the significance of color and social distinctions" when African-Americans face illness or enter the health care system.

The selections chronicle struggle and survival, illness and loss, humiliation and pride, triumph and sorrow. These pieces speak to all of us, as Edmund Pellegrino states in his essay, "Ethnicity and Healing": "[p]aradoxically, as we learn more about the uniqueness of African-American culture, we are drawn closer to the common humanity we share with the subjects of these stories and poems."

View full annotation

Summary:

The poet describes the suffering associated with a migraine headache.

View full annotation