TRAPPED IN HER BODY, SHE STILL TOUCHES HIS HEART

/
TRAPPED IN HER BODY, SHE STILL TOUCHES HIS HEART

They met in Virginia in 1946. They were in their 20s. She was a Navy nurse, and he was a Navy doctor. He noticed her in the cafeteria, then on the dance floor. "All the fly boys liked to dance with her." He liked how she walked - "Lily had her own kind of gait." And how "she could recite poetry like mad." And how, at the age of 16, "all on her own she decided to become a Catholic." There wasn't anything that Dr. Jack Manning didn't like about Lily Sharpe Fields. They married at the US Naval Chapel in Portsmouth, Va., and a year later Jack Manning brought his new bride and infant son home to Taunton…

Read More

WORDS ESCAPE HER BUT LAUGH IS STILL THERE

/
WORDS ESCAPE HER BUT LAUGH IS STILL THERE

She has lost her words. Last year, I could feed them to her. Fill in the blanks. "How is . . . the bald one?" she said when I came to visit. She exaggerated bald, drawled the word, made a joke, covered up. I covered up, too. "How is Bruce? He's great. Definitely bald, but great."

Read More

ALS mustn't paralyze us with fear

/
ALS mustn't paralyze us with fear

I didn't know him, had never even heard of him until I read about his death in Monday's paper. ``Francis A. Carlson, at 30, of Franklin, ALS activist.''

ALS is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Lou Gehrig's disease. Of all the diseases you don't want to get, this ought to top the list. It paralyzes the body but leaves the mind intact. People think it's rare, that it strikes only older people. But in the United States alone, 30,000 people have it, 15 people a day die from it and 15 more are, every day, diagnosed with it.

Read More

Personal path is best medicine

/
Personal path is best medicine

Her baby was 12 hours old. Her husband had gone home to get his parents. Her parents were in the cafeteria. She was with a teenage cousin when a stranger in street clothes - he never introduced himself, never said "Good afternoon, I'm Dr. So-and-So," walked into her hospital room and over to the bassinet and began inspecting the baby. "What are you doing?" the new mother - my daughter - asked.

Read More

Evalyn has the gift to give

/

Evalyn had her bone-marrow transplant a month ago. The words take a single breath. One exhale and they're said. Even their meaning fails to hint at all a transplant entails. The word is ordinary. Transplant evokes an ivy grown too big for its pot, upended and plunked down in a bigger, prettier container; or a sprawling bush dug up from the front yard and moved to the back. Transplants are a part of gardening. A little sun, a lot of water and transplanted things grow sturdier. Even a human transplant is just a person raised in one place who now lives in another.

Read More

Their courage is breathtaking

/
Their courage is breathtaking

Somewhere, on an old home movie, still on a reel, are seconds of Amy doing cartwheels in my garage. The film is dark, so her face is hidden. But you can see clearly her small, thin body, her short, straight hair and her dark-rimmed glasses, which, even when she wasn't doing cartwheels, were always slipping down her face. Amy did cartwheels the way she did everything, as if she had to do as many as she could, while she could. As if she knew she had to set records in record time…

Read More

Faith, love sustain a family

/
Faith, love sustain a family

There are no feelings of doom and gloom in the sprawling ranch in Walpole where Debbie and Mark Bernabei live with their two sons, Nicky and Brett. No "Woe is me," or "Why us?" There is instead the sound of Brett's laughter, cartoons on TV, rays of sunlight pouring in from huge windows, photographs of the boys at different ages on the walls and on the bookshelves and flowers, or the feel of them, in every room…

Read More

Frankie's snowman built with love

/
Frankie's snowman built with love

Michelle and Victor Clerico speak in whispers because sound hurts their son's ears and they touch him gently because pain comes with even the lightest touch. Frankie is 5 and handsome with thick red hair and smooth pale skin and a heart as big as he is small. He tells his parents that when he dies he's going to Heaven and that God is going to give him wings. He tells his little sister: "Don't be sad. When I'm in heaven you won't be able to see me but I'll keep an eye on you."

Read More

Still giving life to his father

/
Still giving life to his father

Robert sits on a chair next to his father's bed. He holds his father's hand and talks to him just to talk. He tells him about the day's news, about a weekend they spent in Maine, about all the people who have come to the hospital to visit. When an aide arrives to take his father's temperature with a thermometer she has to put in his ear, Robert explains the procedures. His father motions and Robert understands. "You want some water?" he asks. The older man nods and Robert adjusts the bed and holds his father and puts a cup to his lips and says, "It's coming," as he tilts the cup so that just a tiny bit of liquid drips into his father's mouth. More than a little will make him choke and cough and struggle for breath. And he is struggling hard enough as it is.

Read More

True love endures all things

/
True love endures all things

I don't know his name or where he comes from or where he goes when he leaves the hospital. I don't know if he has children, a job, a house, a car, a life that's more than a vigil. I know nothing about him except that he sits in a hospital chair in the afternoons beside a wife who cannot walk or talk or reach out even to touch his hand, a wife who may not even know he is there….

Read More

Medicare's pound-foolish rules

/
Medicare's pound-foolish rules

She doesn't say, "I can't" or "I won't," or "Why me?" She simply doesn't complain. She wakes up in the morning, puts a smile on her face and plays the hand she's been dealt. She has to use a slide board to get from her bed to her wheelchair. The middle-of-the-night transfer is the toughest. It's dark and she's tired and it's a huge effort to shimmy onto the board, position the board onto the wheelchair, ease her body into the chair and wheel out of the bedroom into the bathroom…

Read More

One more day to live in the sun

/
One more day to live in the sun

Five weeks after she had her second leg amputated the doctors sent her home with health aides coming in just a few hours a day. I was terrified for her and for me. How could this 85-year-old woman live without constant help? How would she get from the bed to the wheelchair, from the wheelchair to the bathroom? How could she maneuver the wheelchair through an opening so small that I had trouble when I pushed the chair? Where would she get the strength and the patience to perform such a task?

Read More

Drunk driver claims a victim

/

It is snowing and I am late, the traffic on Route 138 backed up for miles. When I arrive at New England Sinai Hospital, Laurie Kelly is gone because the traffic will make her late if she waits for me. She cannot be late. She has driven all the way from Monument Beach to Stoughton with her 6-year-old daughter so that the child can see with her own eyes that her father is still in the same room, in the same hospital bed, where he was yesterday, and the day before yesterday and dozens of days before that.

Read More

Wee steps and slow

/

Waiting. That's what we've been doing. Waiting for the drugs to work, for the infection to abate, for the pain to go away, for the snow to fall, for Christmas to come. Waiting. That's what we continue to do. Monday we heard the forecast: a major winter storm. Monday we heard another forecast: my mother-in-law’s foot has to be amputated.. Silence then, and terror, too. Not the artificial kind buoyed by hysterical newscasters who caution people to bottle water and stock up on batteries because of some potential danger. Butl terror fueled by the inevitable…

Read More

Turning 85 is a present for all those who love her

/

When she was 80, we bought her 80 presents. It took a while to find 80 things that an 80-year-old didn't already have and could eventually use, but we did. We bought shortbread and jelly and notepaper and stamps and dusting powder and assorted teas, and wrapped all the gifts in silver foil and tied them with white bows then placed them in and around a pink hatbox. The presents, by their sheer number, made 80 look inviting. My mother-in-law, surrounded by family and friends, sat in the living room and talked and laughed as she unwrapped each present…

Read More

We need to see all of life's road

/

Her feet are cold and swollen and sore. She lies in a hospital bed, her legs elevated higher than her heart. Every morning her toes are painted with some antibacterial solution, then wrapped in small sausage-like pieces of gauze. Next her feet are shrouded in white. From her ankles down, she looks like a mummy. The problem is circulation…

Read More