I recovered over the next weeks, and my daughter stayed strong through all of it.

Dr.

Whitaker came by most days.

He asked, once, if he could present my case at a clinical conference — anonymized, if I liked — not because it was shocking, but because of what it taught.

“Which is what?” I asked.

“That reacting before you understand,” he said, “can make a good physician do the wrong thing.

The first instinct in that room was to tear the larvae out because they looked like a nightmare.

The right response was to stop, and look closer, and understand what was actually in front of us.” I told him that lesson worked a good deal further than hospitals — and I thought, of course, of my mother, and of two women who had spent sixteen years staring at each other’s lives without once trying to understand them.