1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 8 sunday may 23 1982" AND stemmed:hous)
[... 9 paragraphs ...]
Six days ago, on May 18, and to our great relief, Dr. Mandali finally stepped up the strength of the thyroid hormone pills she is prescribing for my wife—from 50 to 70 micrograms daily. “But the benefits are still weeks away,” she told Jane. The increase followed the positive results of a blood test the doctor had ordered a few days previously: A hospital technician had come to our hill house to draw blood from Jane—performing a “phlebotomy service.” Now Jane must have such a test before each increase in her thyroid medication.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Some of our other books contain more information on how Jane grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. Her father died in 1971, when he was 68. Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn’t seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. I didn’t urge her to do so, either. For my part, I’d always felt distinctly uneasy in Marie’s presence on the few occasions we met.
[... 18 paragraphs ...]