by Kristen Tsetsi
I certainly don't like the stories about the critically ill, no - not in the New Yorker, not in the web magazines you find on the Internet, not in Reader's Digest. Trite, the descriptions of tubes and programmable beds and all the words never said still locked in the lungs of visitors standing bedside, or stuck in the sputum sliming a trach balloon. I don't care what anyone learns or doesn't learn, who is sad or who isn't and why, what the needle sores look like on the arm that was once flesh-healthy. At the first mention of "feeding tube" or "bright, sterile hospital," I flip or scroll or click forward - those stories tire me. They always have, yes, as have the Diseased Children and Cancer Women movies on Lifetime. Even now, I won't read one of those hospital stories, because even now, I'd be insufferably bored, but I do, now, understand the compulsion to write about it - just don't expect me to want you to read it.
6S
Kristen Tsetsi is the author of Homefront.
