She was a mesmerizing storyteller, with an eye for the lurid detail and a sense for just how much to exaggerate. I had her repeat her stories over and over again, as children do. They were touchstones in a vast, confusing universe. Her experiences and those of our counterparts in Pine Valley roiled beneath the surface of my quiet suburban childhood.
This woman is clearly not disabled, but I followed her around anyway just to make sure. Because I am very thorough at my job, and because that is why you pay me the big bucks.
It was confirmed that Wang resides at 123 ***** St., San Francisco, CA. She does not appear to drive. Wang was seen walking to several neighborhood locations, including a frou-frou “boutique market.”
Prop yourself up in the plaza: dispense optimistic, folksy wisdom to townsfolk whether they want to hear it or not.
Dedicate several hours a day to revenge fantasies/plotting.
Commission a mural directly over your bed so you have something to look at. Make it something you will never tire of. Perhaps a tasteful nude portrait of Peter Falk? You are after all, one classy invalid.
These are facts: three years ago you were 23, you were in graduate school, and you had cancer. This wasn’t always the case, of course, but that’s what became of you over a single Thanksgiving break. Other facts will emerge over time, many will begin to feel as though they had always been a part of yourself, but these three are constants. You hold them close to yourself.
Kelly Davio's previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here. Next month Fox brings back its wildly popular show, Empire, featuring Lucious Lyon, the fictional music mogul, record executive, and bad guy of Shakespearean proportions. Lucious spent the first season of the drama believing he was dying of ALS. But in the final hours of Season One, a smiling neurologist told Lucious he actually has myasthenia gravis, and that it’s “highly…
Kelly Davio's previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here. As a woman, you never know when the question is coming—only that it is. You may be having a perfectly innocuous conversation about the traffic, your favorite brand of peanut butter, or even your latest dental work when someone springs it on you: “You have kids, right?” This spring, while I was representing the literary journal I co-edit at a small…
Kelly Davio's previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here. The late 1990s weren’t the most auspicious time to become a vegetarian. Meatless food of any real interest hadn’t yet entered the American mainstream, so there wasn’t much beyond lentils or chunks of naked and jiggling tofu to recommend itself in school cafeterias. At the same time, vegetarianism seemed less spooky or militant even to devoted meat-eaters; most people knew at…
The third-floor off-campus apartment where I'd failed to live had no buzzer, making it hard for my friend Laura to let her visitors in. That’s what I was, our junior year in college: a visitor. Not the roommate she’d asked me to be, not the one she called out to in the middle of the night when thick, sticky mucus caused by her cystic fibrosis--a genetic disorder she’d lived with her entire life--clogged her lungs…
First, your body must comply by having an ongoing issue that is not easily solved with a round of brutal antibiotics. Then you must prove that is not Just Depression or Just Anxiety or Just Your Questionable Life Choices that are making you ill or think you are ill. This is harder than it sounds. Find doctors through personal referrals, your ears perking up when you hear, “These are the doctors doctors use.” Apologize for…
I have four sets of my grandmother's dentures displayed on a porcelain plate on my dresser. I carried them back from her funeral in Ireland on my lap in a velvet bag. My mother found the bag of fake teeth while we were packing up my grandmother's room and jokingly asked if I wanted them. I didn’t think twice before I said yes. When I bring a date home to spend the night, the dentures…
In the twenty-third year of our marriage, my husband went into surgery for a rare cancer, and came out without any memory of our life. In the hospital that night, gallons of blood pooled inside his body while I watched, trying to compel the nurse to call for a transfusion. After an emergency second surgery, the bleeding was stopped, as was the cancer. But the man he had been never returned. When Richard woke up,…
Last year, my mother planned a trip to Greece. She had the tickets, the tour, the hotels. Everything booked. She was scheduled to fly in September. In May, she found a rough bump the size of a split pea near her anus and scheduled a biopsy. The biopsy was easy, no more than ten minutes. The split pea was cancer. My mother does not like this cancer. But here are some things that she does…
