Victoria spent much of her last days, in the winter of 1999–2000, living and sleeping in a bath in an unheated bathroom, bound hand and foot inside a bin bag, lying in her own urine and faeces. When Victoria was admitted to the North Middlesex Hospital on the evening of 24 February 2000, she was desperately ill. She was bruised, deformed and malnourished. Her temperature was so low it could not be recorded on the hospital’s standard thermometer. Dr Lesley Alsford, the consultant responsible for Victoria’s care on that occasion, said, “I had never seen a case like it before. It is the worst case of child abuse and neglect that I have ever seen.” Victoria’s condition continued to deteriorate.
And now? Now I eats me fish. Some corn cakes and collard greens, just like when I was being raised. Never gonna get past all that corn I
I A HOUSE DIVIDED I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails. Long ago when I was green my beloved said to me in fondness, 'Oh, you Moor, you strange black man, always so full of theses, never a church door to nail them to.' (She, a self-professedly godly un-Christian Indian, joked about Luther's protest at Wittenberg to tease her determinedly ungodly Indian Christian lover: how stories travel, what
I had my oil cloth pitched for a tent but it leaks very badly. I got rather wet but the rain was very hard and lasted only a short time, and I got dry and went back to bed and slept very well. One of the Yankee Lieutenants promised to mail some letters for one of our officers and I wrote to Aunt Martha expecting to send it at the same time but Gen. Johnson stopped the proceeding so I did not send it. There is a force of Yankees on this side of the river and have been there for some time. Why Gen. Johnson don't drive them back I don't know he must have some object in
But, no. We had to unpack our gear, prepare the ground, put up the tent, and then think about food. That wasn’t going to be a quick trip to the frig for ice cream and soda. We needed a camp fire, a place to put our staples so bears wouldn’t get into them, and the meal itself—trout. That meant we had to get our fishing gear ready and wade out to the depth so cold streams and running leeches!
After she was seen, she came out with two missing teeth and a swollen jaw. On our way home there was a horrible wreck on Interstate 10, there were people and sirens everywhere…my portrait of the city wasn’t so great. About 2 years later, my uncle fell sick and the local hospital couldn’t do him any good, they rushed him to the VA hospital in New Orleans…where he later died. Again my view of the city wasn’t so great. A couple more years passed, by this time I was a senior in high school and Senior skip day was approaching and all the students wanted to skip to New Orleans.
Those winter Sundays By Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
As I said earlier my eating habits aren’t the best. I eat out a lot. When I do eat at home eating vegetables are non-existent. I usually eat meat only, or with a baked potato with sour cream. Tonight for example I ate two beef and cheddar sandwiches, and a medium curly fry from Arby’s.
The reason I chose giardia is because while I was pregnant with my twins I lived in an old historic apartment house that had a very old well. Not only did I get very ill but so did my dogs. It took months to clear up the well, but it was very dangerous for me because the medicines to kill the parasites were toxic to my babies. I was 6 months pregnant and too far along for the recommended medicines, but I thankfully wasn’t sick enough to require meds. Giardia lamblia protozoa, giardia lamblia duodenalis, or giardia lamblia intestinalis, is the scientific name of the pathogen that causes giardia.
I couldn’t sleep at night because my stomach was aching. My parents thought it was just an ordinary stomach ache. At midnight my mother took me to the hospital to check if there was any disease in my body. The doctor said that it was just an ordinary stomach ache. Then we went back home and my stomach was still aching.