What Time Does The Bus Come?
When one of our kids was young, we discovered a medical condition that required years of visits to dozens of medical professionals, hundreds of tests, and many more phone calls and emails. My wife Susan took copious handwritten notes of these sessions. It was natural for her, as an English lit major and teacher, to then organize the notes into a narrative. She would sit at the dining room table at night, papers placed on the table like a tic tac toe board, entering them into a word doc. We would then show up at a new medical visit with this “essay” in hand. “Please read this, it will be easier to understand” she would say, handing the printed-out 20-page narrative to a perplexed-looking doctor.
These were, well, dark times. The essay allowed us to make sense of the darkness, the information, to have something more bright and solid to hold onto in the swirl of the vague diagnoses.
Susan spent the better part of the next year evolving the essay into a book - a memoir of a few years’ time, a tale about the intersection and dysfunction of medicine meeting humanity. As memoir the manuscript was written in chronological order - from day 1 of our son’s life through year four.
