While hazarding the hospital for a non-Covid emergency, Doña Quixote revisits her end-of-life decisions
Featured image: Ana Teresa Barboza: embroidery featuring bodily functions. There is no time like having emergency surgery during our worldwide reckoning with Covid-19 to revisit one’s notions of what the end of a life might look like. On the morning of Saturday August 8, I first became aware of intense, lingering stomach pains. By noon, […]
The post While hazarding the hospital for a non-Covid emergency, Doña Quixote revisits her end-of-life decisions appeared first on GERDA SAUNDERS.
Published on August 30, 2020 12:58
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Field Notes on My Dementia
When I turned 61 in 2011, I was diagnosed with cerebral microvascular disease, a precursor of dementia. Since retiring from my job as the associate director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah
When I turned 61 in 2011, I was diagnosed with cerebral microvascular disease, a precursor of dementia. Since retiring from my job as the associate director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah soon after my diagnosis, I completed a memoir, MEMORY’S LAST BREATH: FIELD NOTES ON MY DEMENTIA, which is forthcoming from Hachette Books in June 2017. But dementia does not hold still. Like anyone with a degenerative brain disease, I continue to dement every day, never done until I die. Every time my brain suffers an additional insult, I have less brain power to puzzle out my remaining “self.” There will come a time when I don’t care or don’t know who I am. Until then, though, I hope to maintain this website with the help of my saintly and tech-savvy husband, Peter.
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