The bumps on my fingernails have grown out. It was sometime after I had come home from the hospital that I noticed the bumps: ridges of thickness across each fingernail. I've learned that medications can cause that, for the cartilage to grow thickly as it emerges from the cuticle. Over the months I tracked the progress of these ridges, as they grew closer to my fingertips! Now they've been snipped off by the fingernail clippers. Another sign that my illness is something that is past.

Or is it?

I've just finished Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking, the account of how her mind worked during the first year following the sudden death of her husband, John. Joan and John had returned one evening from visiting their daughter, Quintana, who was critically ill herself, on life support in an ICU. Joan and John sat down to dinner, and John died, of sudden cardiac arrest. His heart simply stopped beating.

Please do not take a single day of life for granted.

I don't think I would be so aware of that, if not for my own illness. So, in that sense, my illness is not in the past.

The Year of Magical Thinking is required reading for many different reasons. What most affected me, actually, were the passages where Joan Didion describes treatment her daughter was receiving. It brought back acute memories of enduring a number of the same procedures.

In memories such as that the past becomes present. And I've found that happening, regularly, while visiting in the hospital. Just yesterday, for instance. I was visiting a man who has a mysterious pneumonia in his lungs. The pulmonologist has done a bronchoscopy, but the results were inconclusive. Another bronchoscopy will be done, and if that's also inconclusive, the patient will be transferred to Norfolk, where there is a chest surgeon, for a lung biopsy. (Of course, the same exact sequence happened to me -- except, by the time I arrived at Norfolk General, I was too sick to survive a lung biopsy. It's even the same Williamsburg pulmonologist doing the bronchoscopies!)

And then, and then -- I was on my way out of the hospital when I saw another of our members, whose mother turned out to have been brought in cardio-pulmonary trouble. As I sat at the mother's bedside, a nurse came in to checked her pulse and blood oxygen ("pulse ox," as the medical people say), and the nurse was concerned because the oxygen level would not stay above 90%. And so, they hooked the patient up to oxygen, which caused her blood oxygen level to climb into the mid-90s. And my past became acutely present: I relived my feelings when I was dependent on oxygen in the hospital and when I got home, and as I was watching my body wean itself off of the oxygen during the weeks after I returned home from the hospital. I remember watching the numbers on the "pulse ox" reader: would it stay in the mid-90s??

Please do not take a single day of health for granted.