Interpreter of Maladies ..........By Jhumpa Lahiri

“Mr. Kapasi pulled over to the side of the road as Mr. Das took a picture of a barefoot man, his head wrapped in a dirty turban, seated on top of a loft of grain sacks pulled by a pair of bullocks.”

“But so romantic”

“He began to check his reflection in the rear view mirror as he drove , fairly grateful that he had chosen the grey suit that morning.”

“When do you return to America”

Mr. Kapasi  fell in love with Mrs.. Das because he thought she had the same feelings. When she had said, “But so romantic” about his job because his wife thought his job was not that important. However, both couples were not that happy with each other and showed no love for each other. Mr. Kapasi felt that there would be a future with Mrs. Das. So, he extended his tour to spend more time with her. Then, Mrs. Das confessed to Mr. Kapasi that Bobby is not Raj’s son . This changed Mr. Kapasi's feeling about Mrs.. Das. He  let the paper with his address written on it fly away. I think he felt that it was better to let the paper disappear. 

Strong Horse Tea......................... Alice Walker

“Why don’t that doctor come on here?”

“I don’t believe in none of that swamp magic. All the old remedies I took when I was a child come Just Short of killing me”.

" We don't need none of your witch's remedies."

" The only thing that can save this child now is some good strong horse tea."

"The only thing. And if you wants him out of the bed you better make tracks to git some."

"Quickly she stuck her mouth there, over the crack, and ankle deep in the slippery mud of the pasture and freezing in her shabby wet coat, she ran home to give the still warm horse tea to her baby Snooks."
 

A mother would do anything to save their child’s life even if they had  to sacrifice their own life. The Snooks cannot be cured. Rannie realized that Sarah is the only person that would be able to save her baby.  Sarah sends Rannie to get the Horse tea so, she can have time to herself ,and realized that her son was going to die.

Report From The Hospital

Report From The Hospital 

 Wislawa Szymborska

“We used matches to draw lots: who would visit him.

And I lost. I got up from our table.

Visiting hours were just about to start”

When I said hello he didn’t say a word.

I tried to take his hand—he pulled it back

Like a hungry dog that won’t give up his bone.

He seemed embarrassed about dying

What do you say to someone like that?

Our eyes never met, like in a faked photograph.

He didn’t care if I stayed or left.

He didn’t ask about anyone from our table

Not you, Barry. Or you, Larry. Or you, Harry.

My head started aching. Who’s dying on whom?

I went on about modern medicine and the three violets in a jar.

I talked about the sun and faded out.

It’s a good thing they have stairs to run down.

It’s a good thing they have gates to let you out.

It’s a good thing you’re all waiting at our table.

The hospital smell makes me sick."

When I read this poem, I felt that the person had no desire to say their goodbye to their loves ones. When a person knows that they are dying, especially have no cure then, they no longer care to live. They are just waiting for death to take them away. When a patient is diagnose with a deadly illness. It scares the patient because all their future goals they wanted to accomplish might never become true. In some cases, being a hospital might worsen the patient condition rather than making better because you think about how many patients have die from the same illness. The hurtful treatment you have to go through, it just makes you weaker instead of stronger.

Short Stories

The Girl with a Pimply Face

" Doctor, you save my baby. I pay you everything,"

" The infant had a severe congenital heart defect, a roar when you listened over the heart that meant, to put it crudely, that she was no good, never would be."

" I'll help her, I said, but she's got a bad heart."

" I pay you. I pay you twenty dollar. Doctor, you fix my baby. You good doctor. You fix."


The use of Force

" I'm here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it."

" I had to have a throat culture for her own protection. But First I told the parents that it was entirely up to them."

"Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks."

" And there it was both tonsils covered with membrane."

In both stories the doctor would do whatever they can to save the patient’s life. However, the only difference between both stories is that in The Girl with a Pimply Face, a Russian family would keep asking for a doctor to come and save her baby.  The doctor would continue to come and check on the baby but, not get paid for the visits because the family did not have enough money.  Until, another doctor told him that he had delivery that baby and didn't paid him either. However, they did have money because the father gets paid by the county. So family is a bunch of liars and the mother is always drinking whisky so, she's never in a stable mind. So the doctor tells him to not continue to see they baby because they are using him.  In The use of Force, the family was not liars. They will do anything for their daughter. The doctor use his knowledge on medicine to be able to  save the child from diphtheria.  

  

A Small Good Thing

"The birthday boy stepped off the curb at an intersection and was immediately knocked down by a car. He fell on his side with his head in the gutter and his legs out in the road."

" The child was in the hospital with a mild concussion and suffering from shock. "

"Why doesn't he wake up, Howard? I don't understand, if he's all right."

" He's going to be all right. He'll wake up in a little while."

"No, I don't ant to call it a coma. He's just in a very deep sleep."

" His lips parted as his last breath was puffed through his throat and exhaled gently through the clenched teeth."

"The doctors called it a hidden occlusion and said it was a one-in-a-million circumstances. Maybe if it could have been detected somehow and surgery undertaken immediately, they could have saved him."

"Is there anything else I can do for the moment?" He asked them.

The first time I had read this story it made me cry because I remember  the time my nephew was in the hospital. It was a terrifying feeling to know that he might die because he had breathing problems. So I felt the same anxiety as Ann and Howard did. The doctor were more detailed in their explanation to my sister than the doctor in the story.   Thankful for us, my nephew did recover, and he is a healthy fourteen year old boy now. It is important how doctors communicate with their patient's love ones because they are trusting them to do everything they can to save them.

 In contrast, "People Like That..." both parents did not trust the doctors with their baby. The mother was more concerned about her son than the father. The father was worried about how they going to pay for the treatment. Also, both doctors did horrible explaining  the diagnose of the patient because one doctor use medical terms that it’s hard to understand for the patient's parents, and the other doctor use very few word .  However, doctors should not always depend on their tests or when they examine patients to determine a patient's Illness because it would always be a correct diagnose.

HER FINAL SHOW

HER FINAL SHOW

" She said it was a better way to die

Than most; she seemed relieved, almost at peace,

The stench of her infected Kaposi's 

Made bearable by the Opium applied

 So daintily behind her ears: "I know

It costs a lot, but dear, I'm nearly gone".

Her Shade of eyeshadow was emerald green;

She clutched her favorite stones. Her final show 

She'd worn them all, sixteen necklaces of pearls,

Ten strings of beads. She said they gave her hope. 

Together, heavy as a gallow's rope,

The gift of drag queens dead of AIDS. " Those girls,

They gave me so much strength." she whispered as 

I turned the morphine up. She hid her leg

Beneath smoothed sheets. I straightened her red wig 

Before pronouncing her to no applause."

The writer is watching her die peaceful in the hospital. Ifound

 

interesting that how she had on the sixteen necklaces from other

 

drag queens that had died from AIDS. The necklaces were the

 

strength that the girls had given her. Also, the writer straightened

 

her wig; the writer wanted her to die looking pretty like how she

 

wants to be remembered.  In the 10,000 AIDS Death in San

 

Francisco poem by Rafael Campo, talks about a particular patient

 

that he had saw dying. He connects to him because the man was the

 

same age as him.  Also, how he reflects by watching that man die

 

and how him being gay was not acceptable in Cuba. People you are

 

gay, lesbian, and transvestites should be able to come out and not

 

be kept in the closet because we live in a moderate world. People

 

should not be judge of their preference or giving less respect vs. an

 

average person.

 

The New York Times had published an article of the 10,000^th AIDS

 

death in San Francisco, and say “a gay Latino male in his 30s”.

 

The New York Times are saying that all the people that had died

 

from AIDS are gay and Latino. They should have given a more

 

been a respectful obituary poem, instead of just saying a drag queen

 

dies from AIDS.  Writers need to more caring toward report about a

 

death. If that person was part of your family, you would want a

 

more detailed report or obituary.

AIDS AND THE POETRY OF HEALING ......RAFAEL CAMPO

" I wrote poems secretly, hiding my notebooks in my closet. I thought about killing myself, because those poems knew that I was gay. " 

"Medicine for years said AIDS was a gay disease. Government waited several more years before a president said AIDS in public." 

" So I am grateful for the poetry that is written about AIDS, in that it has helped me so generously to locate myself in a world irrevocably altered by the presence of the virus." 


" I have lost myself the same way in the faces, the bodies, and the poems of people with AIDS. I see them teaching us, each one of us, the meaning of our own losses. Teaching us that every word is true. "

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

 

“ With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told

that our feelings are not important, our

appearance is all, the sun total of self.”

“Women have been programmed to view our

bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to

others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and

how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by

media images portraying women as essentially

decorative machines of consumer function,

constantly doing battle with rampant decay.” 

" Every woman there their either had a breast removed, might have to have a breast removed, or was afraid of having to have a breast removed. And every woman there could have used a reminder that having one breast did not mean her life was over, nor that she was less a woman, nor that she was condemned to the use of a placebo in order to feel good about herself and the way she looked."

 

Some women do feel insecure with their body after doing the

 

mastectomy because they feel less of women. They feel

 

pressure to wear the prosthesis or have breast construction. 

 

 For example, Angeline Jolie did the mastectomy on both of

 

her breast so, she can prevent breast cancer. I admired her

 

for that because that took a lot to make that decision.

 

However, she does not feel less feminine, she actually really

 

happy with her decision. She still feels secure about her body.

 

I believe the women that are having struggles with their

 

mastectomy they should look up to Jolie. Jolie is a successful,

 

talented, and beautiful woman with or without breast. 

“Women with breast cancer are warriors; also I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breast amputated because of the cancer that is becoming the primary physical scourge of our time. “

 

This quote reminds me about Sontag though 

 

of how using illness in metaphor. Lorde describes her cancer

 

as a battle because she is still fighting it.  Sontag did not like

 

illness being compared to the war. So if Lorde and Sontag

 

would have met in person they would have disagreed with

 

each other perhaps not become friends. 

Blessing for My Left Breast By Anya Silver

Blessing for My Left Breast 

“Your Skin Slit round with a scalpel:

Be brave.

Rise to the aluminum tray,the biopsy needle.

Go, Nipple; go, milk ducts; go veins.

Take with you my lymph nodes,

Canaries of illness, blood cells’ puff balls.

Blessed be my chest wall for surrendering.

Now you will never shrink and wrinkle with age,

 clove-studded orange, bittersweet.

Taken in your beauty, let the last hands

That hold you

Be gentle”

 

Silver is telling her breast to be strong and to be ready for the 











removal of her breast. Having a breast removed because of


 breast cancer, a woman sometimes feels like she is losing a

part of herself and her womanhood. In society, women are

 defined to having the perfect body and for instance, if you

one of your breast then it would not defined you as a

complete woman. Silver wants the doctor to be soft during
 
her surgery but in reality doctors do not take that

inconsideration. Unfortunately for Silver, her wish cannot be



 
granted.