Summary:

In a dramatic monologue, Joanne traces the devastation of a familial proclivity to breast cancer through four generations of women: her grandmother Sarah; her mother; Joanne herself and her two daughters, one of whom is also Sarah.

Joanne’s mother and grandmother both died very young of breast cancer; however, many other family members vanished in the Holocaust and the number of familial cancer deaths is insufficient for her to qualify for genetic testing. Her friend Linda, also a mother of two daughters, learns too late that she carries the BRCA gene; she urges Joanne to be tested.

Tormented by not knowing and equally tormented by what should be done if the test is positive—both for herself and her daughters, she convinces a doctor to lie so that the test can be performed. It is positive; Joanne opts for bilateral preventative mastectomies. During a visit to the gravesite of her mother and grandmother, she begins to explain the genetic risk to her daughters. 

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The conventional, young, corporate executive, Ross Gardiner, is sentenced by a judge to pay weekly visits to the recently widowed and childless Mr. Green. Ross had knocked the elderly gentleman down when he stepped out into the road without looking. No real damage was done, but the judge decided that Ross had been driving too fast.

Neither man wants to be anywhere near the other. Mr Green sends Ross packing, and the younger man appeals to the judge for a different punishment, without success. He therefore returns bringing the peace offering of soup from a kosher deli that the passive-aggressive senior grudgingly devours. “Would I waste good food?” Their common Jewish identity makes everything better for Mr Green, although Ross does not care. For Mr Green the Jews are a people who suffered intolerance and murder and must stick together now. 

They begin to tell stories of their lives. Mr Green grievously misses his wife who did all the cooking and cleaning; “we never argued once in sixty years.”

Things slip back again when Mr Green learns that Ross is gay. Negotiating that shock is facilitated by the older man’s bafflement over how Ross’s father has abandoned and derided him; they slowly grow closer. Mr Green wants Ross to find a nice girl and be happy as he was. Ross patiently explains how that cannot work for him.

Then another crisis erupts when Ross learns that the Green’s had a daughter who married a Gentile for which crime she was shunned by her parents as if she had died.  It is compounded by the shocking discovery that Green’s wife had been writing to her daughter for thirty years without telling her husband. 

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This early Greek painting depicts an episode from Homer's Iliad where Sarpedon, a hero of the Trojan War, is killed by the spear of Patroklos, an enemy warrior. Zeus watches as his son "dies raging" (Iliad, transl. Richmond Lattimore, book 16, line 491). Two winged figures who represent Sleep and Death gently lift the still-bleeding Sarpedon off the battlefield. Standing stoically behind Sleep and Death, are Laodamas and Hippolochos, two Trojan warriors who were killed in battle prior to Sarpedon.

Euphronios, one of the first to work in the red-figure method, uses his simple but skillful technique to draw the hero's body at the moment it succumbs to death. Especially vivid are the three open wounds on Sarpedon's body from which blood spills to the ground. Sarpedon's eyes are closed, his limp hands drag along the ground. Zeus, powerless to prevent his son's suffering and death, sends the god Hermes to attend to his son's burial. Hermes, in turn, summons the caretakers Sleep and Death to transport Sarpedon to his grave.

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Twelve-year old Philip is admitted to the hospital for a month of nightly infusions of amphotericin, a drug used to treat severe fungal infections. Wise beyond his years, he’s been in the hospital before and is only too familiar with its routines: the "vampires" who take blood; the candy-stripers who volunteer cheerfulness.

Four nurses welcome Philip back, teasing him about his annoying but intelligent insights and promising excellent outcomes this time. The doctors are testing a wonderful new drug that should eliminate all the horrible side effects that he had experienced in the past. But the new drug does not work, and Philip passes a miserable night. 

He feels sorry for his parents who are eager for him to receive the best of care; he puts on a smile for them and notices them putting on smiles for him. He tries to be brave for the doctor too, but surprises himself by voicing his opinion, finally making his physician understand that the new anti-side-effect drug does not work.

In the midst of yet another difficult night, Philip decides that he will refuse all future infusions. And he begins to feel well. We do not know what will happen in the morning, but one has the hopeful impression that Phillip will have his own way.

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A chorus of lab techs making symmetrical repetitive motions with microscopes, pipettes, and petri dishes opens the play. They persist in the background of the set, which is the waiting and consulting rooms of a clinic for reproductive technology.  The chief, Dr. Staiman, is not only an expert in this field of human biology — he also enjoys an international reputation (and many patents) for his genetic manipulation of orchids in a quest for perfect blooms.

Heather and Rose are both clients of the facility. Heather wants a baby and needs help to be able to conceive. Rose could actually conceive on her own; however, she is investing in expensive and painful genetic selection to avoid having a child with the same trait as her brother. His Tourette’s syndrome, she contends, ruined life for her parents and herself as well as for him.

It emerges that Heather too has Tourette’s syndrome, but she does not believe it ruined life for her family and is unafraid of having an affected child. The women must wrestle with the notion that Rose does not think someone like Heather should exist; and Heather wonders if she should be testing her own embryos.

The two clinic doctors, Blume and Staiman, offer similar services, but as an ethicist, Blume worries about the moral implications of the new technology. Heather challenges Staiman over his willingness to destroy an embryo that might become a person like herself. He seems baffled by her concern, claiming that science makes perfection possible and that the decision should belong to the parent.

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Five Days at Memorial is the book length expansion  of the New York Times Sunday Magazine article that the author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning physician-journalist, published in 2009. The book, the result of years of research and literally hundreds of interviews, chronicles the five days (August 28 to September 1, 2005) during which the medical staff remaining at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans tried to care for the patients -- over a hundred of them stranded, like the staff, in a hospital without water or electricity --following the flooding wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

After an 8 page prologue, the book is divided into two sections, "Deadly Choices" (228pp, the narrative of those five days) and "Reckoning" (256pp, the legal battles over the injections of midazolam (a sedative) and morphine by some of those staff and prosecuted as homicide -- what others called "euthanasia.") "Deadly Choices" relates almost hourly the five days inside Memorial from the viewpoint of patients, patients' relatives, physicians, nurses, administrators of Memorial, Tenet (the holding company owning and running Memorial) and LifeCare -- the long-term care area within Memorial devoted to the care of terminally ill and debilitated patients -- owned by a separate company. Ethical and legal questions of triage, DNR, record-keeping, accountability, communication (primarily the failure thereof) and leadership are on almost every page. At the heart of this book, however, is the mystery of the unexplained deaths of so many patients during those five days. (On September 11, 2005, a disaster mortuary team recovered 45 bodies from many different places in Memorial, page 234). The crux of the mystery of these deaths is the manner in which nine in particular died in the beleaguered hospital on the fifth and last day when, paradoxically, relief had become real and effective and inclusive, seemingly obviating such injections.

The final pages of "Reckoning" deal with the fallout - historical, ethical, political and medical -- and current events relevant to these five days and the almost two years following. (The final verdict of not guilty -- the actual wording was "Not a true bill" since it was a grand jury declining to indict the one physician, Anna Pou, and the two nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo -- was rendered on July 24, 2007). There are a map of Memorial Hospital and a cast of characters at the front of the book and extensive notes, bibliography and index at the end.

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Summary:

While the author's surgery for throat cancer when he was 14 years old, and its aftermath are the central events in this graphic memoir, Stitches is more essentially the story of a dysfunctional family. The memoir begins when David Small is six, growing up in Detroit, drawing, and observing the body language of his often silent parents and brother. Tension fills the house. David's mother's face is in an almost permanent scowl and the "mere moving of her fork a half inch to the right spelled dread at the dinner table" (16).  She slams pots and kitchen cabinet doors while David's radiologist father lets loose on a punching bag in the basement and his brother beats drums. David is in a constant struggle to avoid his mother's fury, which author/artist David depicts as a tidal wave. His father is remote, puffing silently on his pipe.
 
When David is 11 a female friend of the family, the wife of a surgeon, draws attention to a growth on David's neck, which his parents have either failed to notice or knowingly ignored. In due time the neck is x-rayed. The surgeon-friend diagnoses a sebaceous cyst and recommends an operation. With the mother's frequent protests about lack of money--in spite of an extended shopping spree the parents undertake-- it is three and a half more years before the surgery takes place. David undergoes the procedure with relative equanimity, the hospital and medical staff being familiar -- people he "thought of as my extended family, my protectors" (160). When he wakes up from the surgery, his father assures him that nothing is wrong but that he will need a second operation by a specialist. Uncharacteristically, his mother asks if there is anything she can get for him.

Waking up from the second surgery, David has no voice -- one vocal cord and his thyroid gland have been removed. "The fact that you now have no voice will define you from here on in" (186). Later, when changing his bandage by himself, he discovers a long, ugly array of stitches on the side of his neck. He has nightmares, and on one sleepless night as he wanders the house, discovers a letter written by one of his parents to "mama" which says, "of course the boy does not know it was cancer" (204). The accumulated silences and parental betrayal trigger David's delinquent behavior and  time in a boarding school, from which he runs away three times; ultimately he is expelled with a recommendation to get psychiatric help. Reluctantly, his mother drives him to a psychoanalyst -- "it's like throwing money down a hole, if you ask me" (247) -- but this intervention turns David's life around. The analyst, depicted by the author as a tall, fully clothed white rabbit, explains to David, "your mother doesn't love you" (255).  "It was such a relief to hear" said Small in an interview. Another truth is eventually revealed by David's father, who takes David out to dinner to tell him, after a lengthy silence, that the numerous x-ray treatments for sinus infections he had given the young David must have caused the throat cancer: "two-to-four hundred rads. I GAVE YOU CANCER" (286-287).

 

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Summary:

The third novel in the series of Zol Szabo, who is a public-health doctor for the Hamilton Ontario region. He is also a single parent to ten year-old, Max, because his unstable wife, Francine, could not deal with Max’s mild physical disability. His partner in life and work is now Colleen, an attractive woman detective whom he met in the first novel and who looks "like Cameron Diaz in a ponytail” (p. 140).

Teenagers at a private religious school begin to sicken and some die of a mysterious liver ailment. School authorities categorically deny any use of drugs, tobacco, or alcohol—but Szabo’s team quickly discovers that not only do the kids smoke, they prefer a cheaper form of cigarette that is manufactured and sold at cut rates by the local native community.

In the background of this stressful situation, Zol’s mother is dying of cancer, his ex-wife is threatening to visit, and Zol is caught up in a violent break-in at a Toronto museum that resulted in the theft of a precious native artifact.

The team unravels a series of epidemiological clues that point to the interaction of pesticide-tainted tobacco reacting with liver cells to produce the dangerous disease. He must then convince the unscrupulous cigarette manufacturer to stop production before the problem spreads widely. Their methods are unorthodox because they lack support from the bosses who are afraid of public and political opinion. Using clandestine photography they prove that the owner has been lying about his distribution methods.

The investigation helps to solve the older murder of a native woman scientist who had uncovered the problem and been brutally silenced.

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The first-person, nameless narrator is in mid-1970s San Francisco on a "sabbatical" that is more like an exile from his academic post in the east. He takes an office in a downtown building to force himself to leave his dull accommodations. Occasionally he can hear everything that transpires from the space on the other side of the wall, which is the office of psychiatrist, Dr. Schüssler. Normally, the woman doctor runs a white-noise machine to ensure privacy, but one patient — who becomes “my patient” — hates the noise and insists it be turned off.

Adopted in infancy, “my patient” is in a fraught lesbian relationship. Her doctor has been encouraging her to find her birth mother, but she keeps resisting. Finally she embarks on a long exploration that is told through her accounts to the doctor, through conversations repeated and letters read out loud. As an academic scholar, the eavesdropping narrator is able to trace records that could not be found by the patient; he takes the liberty of meddling, falsifying an agency letter and setting her on the correct path. He also realizes that the psychiatrist’s father was a Nazi officer by listening to telephone conversations with her own mentor.

“My patient” learns that her mother was Jewish and escaped death by being in a special facility as a comfort woman. Chameleon-like the mother’s identity changes over and over. In contrast to the nameless patient, her name moves from Maria to Miriam to Michal; she lives in Israel where the patient goes to find her. The biological father’s identity is a mystery—perhaps someone whom Michal loved, perhaps a Nazi officer. The sacrifice of her child to a Catholic adoption agency moves from inexplicable selfishness to desperate selflessness. Surprises continue to the end when "my patient" finds an Israeli sister who has been in contact with the mother but is no less confused over her identity.

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Summary:

Nurse Moira is caring for three different women in labour: two have female birth partners; one is alone. 

Teenage Stacey with her school friend Jeannine adopts a punk, devil-may-care attitude to the whole process, but shrieks in agony with her pains; she plans to keep the baby in defiance of all her family members and advisors. Unknown to Stacey, Jeannine once had a baby and gave it away for adoption; it is a secret that Jeannine wants to believe was for the best.

The solitary Jane had once adopted a baby like Jeannine’s only to lose it again within the requisite month-long waiting period. Heartbroken Jane and her husband paid for a woman to have IVF so that Jane could become pregnant. She is thrilled that she will finally become a mother, but her earlier experiences make her sympathize with mothers who cannot conceive or who have lost babies through adoption or death.

Eva an immigrant from Kosovo had been brought to Canada as a housekeeper by the driven businesswoman Carol, who is "coaching" her. Because Carol is no longer fertile, she deliberately goaded Eva into becoming a surrogate mother, inseminated artificially through her husband’s sperm. Should Eva refuse or break the contract, she will be returned to Kosovo. For fear of the slightest damage to the child that she intends to claim, Carol will not let Eva speak or have any analgesia. Eva is miserable; the audience hears her thoughts, but Carol and the nurse cannot.

Moira copes with the three radically different scenarios, succeeding in giving egalitarian care. Moira and Jane inform Eva of her rights, and she takes her baby and returns to Kosovo. 

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