Patient

A bright-eyed college senior, I sat in the leather exam room chair for my first LASIK consult. I had chosen the nearest ophthalmologist in my small town, to evaluate my candidacy. “Do you have any questions for me?”, the doctor asked as he twisted off the cap on the bottle of eye drops. My mind went blank- “I can’t think of any questions…” As I waited in the room for my eyes to dilate, I typed into my phone “Questions…

Wednesday evening, the phone rang, and those dreaded words came across the earpiece; your mother is in the emergency room and has fallen and broken her right hip. To create context for this story, allow me a moment to give you some relevance to my mother as an individual. She has been an independent soul all her life. My father’s career was very demanding; therefore, he traveled four out of five days every week. To survive, my mother became extraordinarily…