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Warned, but Not Ready …
Long before I’d reached an inner certainty that Dave and I would last “forever together” (I had such a shattered record of past mistakes!), I became determined to take care of him. It wasn’t the physical stuff that triggered my urge to defend, protect, make things easier. Instead, it was the realization, within days of meeting him, that life handed Dave humiliation on a daily basis. It’s a terrible thing to be “too large” in America. Seeing his courage and determination kicked something into being in me, as strong as the urge to parent my kids, and at least as deep. Maybe more so.
In autumn 2002, a few months after we became a couple, Dave asked me to come along to Dartmouth Medical Center for his colonoscopy. I had almost no experience of hospitals, but he asked, and I said “of course.” After all, what he most needed that day — besides someone to distract him with other topics of conversation — was my role as driver for the return trip, when he’d still be under the influence of the drugs that get a person through this procedure.
Hospitals in northeastern Vermont were small at the time, and you always saw someone you knew, at a welcome desk or in a pink volunteer smock or waving from a bed. Dartmouth Medical Center had none of that: Sprawling, high-ceilinged, so spacious it could afford to perch a grand piano in one of the hallways with a musician, so baffling that I had to…
