NOTE: This blog post contains graphic descriptions of medical conditions and procedures. It is written with express permission from the person whose situation is described.

White horses are breaking waves of the sea or ocean. Also known as whitecaps, these small surface waves break offshore and impede open water swimmers. But as it’s said, slow progress is better than no progress.

Jenny received a radical small bowel resection on March 1, 2023 and has been hospitalized at Mayo Clinic for recovery ever since. By some miracle, she did not go into ICU after her surgery. She has a private room with a view, on the 5th floor at the Saint Mary’s Hospital Campus . Over the last four weeks, she’s gone from being tied to the wall by monitors, IVs, tubes, and machines to now walking herself to the bathroom and taking medication by mouth.

But it is this last piece that is the problem. Digestion.

NOTE: This blog post contains graphic descriptions of medical conditions and procedures. It is written with express permission from the person whose situation is described.

Last November, I was lucky enough to host the awards gala at the League of Minnesota Poets (LOMP) 2022 Fall Poetry Conference at the Arrowwood Resort in Alexandria, MN. After the gala, there was a late-night poetry reading in the LOMP hotel room. One of the big winners is a nurse who works at Mayo Clinic. She read a poem about how patients and their families expect them to be miracle workers, but they’re not.

I get it. We are all still mortal. They can’t save everybody. But with all due respect, she’s wrong.

Jenny and I arrived in Rochester on the evening of Monday, February 27 to an Airbnb, about four blocks from Mayo Clinic’s Saint Mary’s Campus, where I would be staying for two weeks if everything went well, fully aware that Jenny’s surgery could be fatal.

NOTE: This blog post contains graphic descriptions of medical conditions and procedures. It is written with express permission from the person whose situation is described.

Today is my brother’s birthday. He would be 63 years old, but he died on July 17, 2022. He was in an incurable cycle of pneumonia, other infections, and hospital stays. I had to make the choice between length of life and quality of life. And while I know signing those pink hospice papers was the right decision, it doesn’t make it any easier.

It is the same for every person who is called upon to be the decision maker for the seriously ill and the dying. The will to live is so fierce, so basic within the construction of lifeforms, that even my mother who had no hope of survival from Leukemia, fought to the very end.

Tomorrow, I will pack up my suitcase and home office and drive to pick up Jenny, with her duffel bags of medical supplies and comfortable clothing, and take her to Rochester, MN for what can only be categorized as a ‘Hail Mary’ surgery at Mayo Clinic on March 1, 2023.