Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

I have thought hard about this, and I have decided that the details have no place in this telling, because they are not a recipe and must never be read as one.

What I attempted was an act of pure desperation, improvised far outside any hospital, by a person with fifteen years of emergency training and no other option left in the world.

It was not clean.

It was not safe.

It is not something I would ever, under any circumstances, tell another living soul to try.

It was simply the only card I had left to play against an infection that was going to kill us both, and I played it, and for hours afterward I lay there and could hardly stand the fact of what I had done, and I would not let myself look.

So instead I thought about my mother.