Ignorance Kills

Some things hurt too much to be remembered and deserve the banishment to the deep recesses of your mind never to be relived until something chews through the armor and forces you to remember and relive the trauma you wish you could forget.

I only saw Janice a couple of times. It’s strange how intimate you can become with people in the hospital in a moment of crisis. I never saw her husband there but I knew he was a lawyer. They tried to have children but it just wasn’t in the cards for them. So Janice went to Vietnam to adopt a child. She named him Alex.

He was wearing thick goggle glasses when I first saw him. I remember it being bitterly cold that day when we pulled in to the hospital. The salt on the roads wasn’t melting the ice on the roads. The interstate was just clogged with broken down cars. We’d been snowed in for three weeks from the 94 blizzard.

I would have to scout mom’s room to see if lunch had been served or not because hospital food at the time would make her puke. I knew the exact smell so I brought two cans of Glade to deaden the smell. We were lucky because the hospital had a new policy that you could have a private room if you paid an extra $40 a night. When mom was in the hospital, I made sure she was never alone for a moment. Granny would come sit during the day so I could go home and come back for the night.