On hearing that her comatose daughter needs a tracheotomy.
“Everyone in the neuro units got a trach, they had kept saying to me that day … A trach could be done with fentanyl and a muscle relaxant, she would be under anesthesia no more than an hour. A trach would leave no cosmetic effect to speak of, ‘only a little dimple scar,’ ‘as time goes by maybe no scar at all.’ They kept mentioning this last point, as if the basis for my resistance to the trach was the scar. They were doctors, however freshly minted. I was not. Ergo, any concerns I had must be cosmetic, frivolous. In fact I had no idea why I so resisted the trach.” (125)
The Year of Magical Thinking. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2005.
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