He would only call me by my first name. He wanted to do the talking, too, rather than have his wife tell me how he was doing. They always showed up together; I imagined it was to make up for time lost when he worked high steel around the country. The antenna farm in Duluth, a set of communication towers overlooking the city, was a source of pride to him. He had worked on a lot of it.  How he could hang around on top of a rising column of steel sticks until it got done was as much a mystery to me as how he got epilepsy was to him. At the end of it, you’re a day planner. Just because you feel able doesn’t mean you get to keep doing it. It’s not as if there is a big crane somewhere bringing up the parts you need. You take a measured step and move on.

So many kinds of stones give me concern, besides the one in my shoe. Gallstones, kidney stones, calcifications in the heart and knees; otoliths even, the pebbles in the inner ear that say which way is up, dancing their orientation beneath the lintels of Stonehenge. Some monoliths I also find confusing. Are the people climbing stairs inside the Washington Monument patriotic or exercising their right to free vision? Is the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde really part of Paris anymore? Do Minneapolis skyscrapers scrape anything; and how does the sky feel about that, with all the rest of Minnesota to cover? What about lithographs, the stony faces people make on paper; petroglyphs pecked ages ago into eons-old rock; pictographs left on waterside cliffs at Hegman Lake? There is a way to know. Touch the stone. Feel what moves.

This week I finished counting the trees in our woods. I could not have done it without the assistance of three residential gray squirrels who hopped grids in the snow, thereby facilitating the counting process. My purpose has been the identification and enumeration of trees for which I am responsible, so as to assist in their management. The deer were of no help whatsoever, walking around chewing on maple twigs and sticking always to the same path, without regard for a system. It appears there are seven hundred thirty-eight trees, plus bushes. Thirty-two per cent are red or black oak. Twenty-seven per cent are Norway pine, followed by eighteen per cent maple, nine per cent jack pine and seven per cent poplar. The remainder is made up of one to two per cent each chokecherry, pin cherry, white pine, serviceberry, hornbeam, black cherry and white spruce, the spruce concentrated near a small pond. A few ornamentals introduced near the house are included in the count. Someone came to our door a while back. She said the census showed there are two in our household, a male and a female and was this correct. Yes, I said, it is correct in a way, but I think you are selling this place short. There are hundreds of others here; I just haven’t finished counting them yet. Well, she said, when you do, let me know. She looked at me peculiarly, I thought, considering she was the one who had asked the question. I had imagined the census as seeking useful detail. She got back into her car, a dark blue 2007 Chevy Malibu LT with Wisconsin plates.  It is the only one of its type I have seen in our area, where about thirty-eight per cent of all vehicles are Chevy’s, nearly half of them pick-ups or light vans, slightly less than nine per cent of the total being dark blue, the latter regarded by most observers as being invasives from Minnesota.

They wheeled him in, the stretcher familiar stainless steel, the sheet tight under him. Raving. Brought from the bus station on his way north. Turned out it was appendicitis. Later, we talk. No family, but a grandfather told him to be quiet and gave him other advice. This is the first place in a long time he has felt at home. People to look after him; people who don’t pay as much attention to who he is as to how his drain is doing; people who live in the present, his present, no strings attached.

In Journal of Emergency Medicine 2002; 22(3); 321.

I resonated magnetically the other day. I became a virtual needle. It didn’t hurt at all. The way I knew was that for a brief period all my molecules lined up facing north. For a few seconds I saw everything clearly, without passion or confusion.

I saw Gerardus Mercator at a long table, poring over his projection of the known world, truth in navigation sliced like a deck of cards, thirteen organs plus the joker. It was 1569, not that long ago really, considering how long people have been at sea. He would have liked having an MRI himself, I thought, with the complex math, the radiofrequency spins and all. But he was too early. The world had only been round a few hundred years.

In Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts and Humanities 5, 1, 2008.

At age ten, I received what I believed to be a veterinary-size dose of gamma globulin in each buttock and passed out cold in the doctor’s waiting room. A polio epidemic had taken down a boy in an adjacent block of our neighborhood. Some lady hollered at us to get out of the river we played in or we would get sick and die and my parents were taking no chances.

A couple years later as a newspaper carrier I plopped on people’s porches an edition headlining Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery of an injectable polio vaccine. More shots. Smaller. This time everyone I knew got them, waiting in linoleum-floored rooms with old magazines all over town.

I saw only two cases of polio in my practice, one in an unvaccinated adult, the other in a recently vaccinated child. Diagnosed the first, missed the second. Never saw a case in training, had to look it up. I checked out a possible third case with an elderly pediatrician. He had finished his hospital rounds and was putting on his coat to go home. He assured me that from the history it wasn’t polio. What the child had, he couldn’t say, but “It’s not polio.” He had seen hundreds of cases of real polio.

It was a relief to hear. You can only get so much from books.

In Medical Humanities 35, 2, 2009

Trail walk up the Temperance. Rhyolite gorges, cedars, sunshine. Noises. Fourteen-year-old in the river, caught between rocks. Father distraught. Send back to the car for ropes, tie pieces together. Rock climber shows up, knows the river. Makes a loop, body size. Drops it toward the kid, edges out over the gorge. Twenty feet down. We suggest tying the rope to a tree. He glances at the tree, says hold the rope yourselves. His body, forty-five degrees out over the gorge, forms a perfect fulcrum for the now-vertical rope. Talks gently to the boy over the roar of the water. Put it over yourself. Under your arms. Hang on. Pull. Out he comes, in briefs and one sneaker, the rest taken by the river. Cold. County rescue crew arrives. Do you pull other people out of here? Yeah, mostly not alive. Down at the trailhead, cars going by on Scenic Route 61, we talk with dad. Settled down some. Goodbyes, thanks. Everybody drives home.

In Journal of Emergency Medicine 2002; 22(3); 319.

When you go unconscious of pain and concern but try to leave the table as soon as someone lets up on the juice, you’re defined as “consciously sedated.” It’s enough to get you past things medically called “very uncomfortable,” such as nine on a pain scale that goes to ten. First there is conversational chatter, people asking you about your life. Next you awaken in an unfamiliar bed with unusually crisp sheets. Someone has switched your experience button back to RECORD. What is between stays on a non-rewritable disk somewhere which no one can play. It’s cool in here, and bright, like in a supermarket near the frozen foods section. Someone spreads a warmed white cotton blanket over me.

In Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts and Humanities 5, 1, 2008.

This’ll sting, she says to me, and slaps a vein below the tourniquet. It does; she slips the needle in bevel up, jabbing when it fails to yield. The vein is full and waiting; it does not collapse. Blood squirts out into the back ends of little tubes she puts on one after another. Such a nice vein, she murmurs. Such a nice girl, I mumble. Some of me gets up-ended, the rest shaken, all placed in a row of multicolored tops. There is tape everywhere; on my arm, holding up notes on the desk, around instructions in the bathroom saying how to urinate properly into stainless steel cans. I have become a part of this laboratory. I am their storefront. The real business goes on in a larger room behind me, where glass and tubes and machines with lights are, and sinks with faucets arching like necks of horses nibbling grain. She grazes my arm with a tube; I am surprised how warm it is. You’d think you could feel your own blood running inside you. You forget how warm you are inside when you try to act warm or pretend to be cold to save yourself. She holds the tubes in a rack on her way to give them to someone who will see if they all have the same name. As I roll down my shirtsleeve, the bandage tightens in front of my elbow. I put my jacket on and become a visitor, here where you bleed to a plan.

In: Group Practice Journal ©1987 American Medical Group Association (AMGA).

He was angry, stuck inside a hospital run by nuns, the only place in town with what he needed. She was a nurse’s aide, of the legions who care for us when our defenses fail. “I’m Lisa,” she said. “I’m here to give you a bath.” He wasn’t ready to have someone give him a bath. Especially a bed bath. Still, he was too weak to get to the shower. “Take that thing down,” he demanded. “What thing?” she asked. He pointed to the crucifix. A cross, bearing a thin person, arms outstretched, head at a slant, looking toward the ground. Like in every other room of this hospital. She looked at him, hesitated, walked to the wall. Lifting the crucifix from its nail, she set it face down, gently, on the windowsill. Walked back to him, smiled. Soaped up the washcloth. Washed his body.