This Saturday.....
marks the 16th anniversary of my first “drive-by” birth. (Due credit for coining this term given to my appalled mother-in-law, who could not believe why anyone would leave the hospital within hours of having a baby.) Victor Lams muses a little about “drive-through” mastectomies and the conflict between adequate health care and its financing.

Sometimes home is the best place to recover..........sometimes not. And I can imagine how dreadful recovery from an emotionally upsetting procedure must be, when compounded with being left more or less on one’s own to deal with the details. This brings to mind taking care of my sister after some relatively minor surgery last summer and having the doctor tell me to go ahead and remove the drain tubing that worked loose on the drive home from the hospital. (I was an art history major. An art history major with a tremendously good tolerance for the gruesome and some experience with packing the horrifying place where my husband’s incision had started re-opening after some major surgery. Maybe I should have been a theater major - I was good at faking calm capability.) And speaking of the spousal unit....there was that matter of the hernia surgery needed to repair the damage done to his abdomenal musculature during the first surgery. And the second hernia surgery to repair the first one that started to unravel from his retching while on the 50 minute drive home from the hospital while I was driving the old Saab with the sloppy clutch in stop-and-go traffic. This was the point at which I began referring to the hospital as Bum’s Rush-Presbyterian-St Luke's Medical Center. The secong time, they let him stay overnight.........