Getting Right - Softcover

Wilson, Gary D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785351893 ISBN 13: 9781785351891

Verlag: ROUNDFIRE BOOKS, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Suppose your more than mildly irritating leech of a sister calls you, as she usually does wanting money, only this time she says instead that she has cancer and in the course of the conversation challenges you to write the story of her life. You say, sure, you'll do that but you'll tell it the way you see it. The tale that emerges involves not only the dying sister, Connie, but brother Len as well. And it's also about "me," the sibling invited to narrate their shared story and whose interplay of memory and imagination raises the question of whether "the truth" of Connie's life - or of anyone's for that matter - can ever be known.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gary D. Wilson is a fiction writer who currently lives in Chicago, where he writes and teaches novel and short story writing at the University of Chicago. His best-selling first novel, Sing, Ronnie Blue, appeared in 2007.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Getting Right

By Gary D. Wilson

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Gary D. Wilson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-189-1

CHAPTER 1

Act One

Connie

To Begin

The hole in the crook of Connie's arm resembled a miniature red mouth going OOO! A Betty Boop mouth puckering for a kiss, a greedy little baby mouth sucking through a plastic tube injection after injection of clear liquids and antibiotics, none of which assuaged her real hunger as she asked everyone who entered her room when and what the next meal would be. Barring that, couldn't they at least bring her a snack?

The tube was, in medical terms, a line, specifically a peripherally inserted central catheter — a PICC Line, for short — that was put in under local anesthesia by a doctor who threaded it through the complex branching of deep arm and chest veins, via an x-ray monitor, like a spelunker in night-vision goggles exploring the darkly intricate path of a subterranean river system, until it entered finally the superior vena cava. There was little, if any, discomfort during the procedure, since veins, unlike arteries, have no nerve endings. Other than some itching around the tape holding the tube in place, she hardly seemed to notice it was there.

Nurses said the reason they had to install the line was because she kept blowing her IV. No matter what they did, they said her veins collapsed, making the drips ineffective, and she was so damned hard to stick in the first place. They just couldn't keep doing that — to her or themselves. They said the only way she could lose this line was if she deliberately pulled it out.

What they didn't say was that the line was ordered as soon as she came back from surgery, her lung still largely intact because removing it had proved to be impossible due to the cell type of the tumor and the extent of the disease in the lung cavity. Consequently, Plan B was initiated, for which a PICC Line is a standard interim measure, according to medical literature, ideal as it is "for multiple infusions or continuous infusions given in a hospital or at home with a portable pump." But it would stay in only until after she left the hospital and a Porta Cath was implanted under the skin just below her clavicle, with a short tube that went directly through the chest wall into the superior vena cava. A Porta Cath was clean and efficient, making therapy more convenient for caregivers and less immediately painful for her. And it could remain in place indefinitely, although, again, no one seemed willing or able to say how long that might be.

She phoned one night before she knew she was going to have surgery and said hi in her usual hangdog voice that always irritated me and for some reason that night irritated me even more, and I said hi, what was up and she said nothing much, how about with you guys, and so on — the usual litany we'd been going through every week or two since we'd given her the 800 number my wife and I had set up for our sons to call home on while they were at college. She rarely talked about anything beyond weather and her and Sammo's need for more money, which was where most of our conversations ended up, and I was dreading the inevitable she hated to bother us again, but ... with her all the while resenting the fact that she was my sister and had gotten into such straits that she had to ask for money in the first place and was angry at me because of it, as though it were somehow my fault that she was having to call me — and not only that but was doing it for free on our 800 number to boot. Except that night she didn't ask. That night she said she was afraid she had some bad news, and I said what was that, an

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ROUNDFIRE BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785351893
• ISBN 13: 9781785351891
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar