Death, Now or Later

[摘要] After your doctor’s first call to pressure you to prepare for the permanent wound portal to balance life against death - because dialysis is inevitable -, I find you sobbing in your wheelchair. Your doctor calls back to offer you drugs for depression. Really, doctor? This is a man who fears needles, needs to make a desperate decision - not between whole milk or skim - but between death now or later because life continues to leak pounds of urine from his wasting body. Doctor, you offer him drugs. To do what? Render him catatonic, further slow the already erratic beat of this fist, his heart? Turn him into an incapacitated log on a bed that my mother, exhausted, will have to roll over daily to change the soiled linens? Offer Daddy an indirect choice to overdose on the afternoon Mami hangs garlands on the fence, have him sneak into the yellow basket of pill bottles and remember that the color of this possible death could be too many blue ones? Daddy, cry.

[学科分类] 呼吸医学