Since I was a little girl, I’ve been surrounded by sick people. I didn’t always know they were sick, or how abnormal it is to be so small and know so much about all the ways someone can get sick and die.

My earliest memory of this comes from when my family still lived in a trailer park in our tiny New England town. I vividly remember my father being loaded into the back of an ambulance in front of our house. What I can’t recall is which instance of emergency intervention this was—there were so many. I think it was only kidney stones that time. The heart attack came later.

When I was five, my dad—at just forty years old—had a massive heart attack and needed triple bypass surgery to save his life. (The backstory there is a long one—I’ll dive into that another day.) This was before the days of minimally invasive surgery; they had to crack his chest open to fix him. My parents tell me that before the operation, I asked the doctor if my dad was going to die, and apparently, everyone in the room burst into tears. Even as a kid, I was a huge buzzkill.

I remember his enormous stitched incision, the slow, measured walking trips we took together around the trailer park, his dedicated cardiac rehab, and that whimsical heart-shaped pillow he clutched whenever he coughed. Over time, his heart got better. Because he was so young, his outcome was promising, and eventually, life settled into something resembling “normal.” (Though I’ll admit, I kind of missed the heart pillow.)

Then, when I was eleven, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Her surgery lasted something like fourteen hours. There were so many tears from family, cards and well-wishes from my mom’s coworkers, and sad music wafting out of the computer room as my parents sat together, crying. I know this because I sat in my room, stoically listening to it all. I rolled my eyes in annoyance. I didn’t cry with them.

Other sicknesses and traumas followed, so many that I can’t even recall them in order. Here’s a highlight reel:

• My paternal grandmother popped out her hip and later had a heart attack (separate events).

• My mom developed sepsis, needed a temporary ostomy bag, and eventually had her intestines rebuilt with mesh because her cancer surgery had weakened her stomach.

• My dad cut off his toe with a chainsaw. (Yes, really.)

• My dad survived an “unsurvivable” accident at his hydroelectric plant job and became a living legend because of it.

• My maternal grandfather suffered a pulmonary embolism and a massive heart attack that only one surgeon at Mass General could treat.

• Both of my grandmothers had breast cancer.

• My paternal grandmother developed dementia, and her heart stent “timed out” (she passed away in 2023).

• My maternal grandmother was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer and died three months after my paternal grandmother in 2024.

Because of all this, I grew up knowing way too much about the ins and outs of my family’s medical crises. I could tell you all about my mom’s infected bowels or how much blood seeps from a chainsaw wound. I was there through it all. My unspoken job was to be mature, to be sympathetic, to stay out of the way of the adults while absorbing every ugly detail. While the other girls at school were preoccupied with clothes and friends, I carried the weight of sickness and tragedy, experiencing it all through my parents’ raw, unfiltered grief.

I resented them for it. I resented my family for being sick. For letting me disappear into the background while they loudly cried and clung to whatever platitudes they could about “hard times” or “living for today.” I resented the feeling that I had to bear witness to all of it because I was there.

I struggle to reconcile two truths:

1. Illnesses and tragedies are devastating to the people experiencing them, and there’s no wrong way to feel about it.

2. I deserved to be protected as a child. I deserved discretion that I never got.

As an adult, I’m trying to give myself that reassurance. But how do you protect the part of yourself that was never protected in the first place? Who am I if I’m not the emotional lightning rod for everyone else? I hope to find that part of my identity someday.

This is just the beginning of Sleeping Sickness. There’s so much more to tell. I’ll dive deeper into some of the themes here in future posts. If you’ve read this far, I hope my writing made some kind of sense—I’m still figuring this whole blog thing out. (And, well, it’s almost 3 a.m., so that might be part of it too.) But when inspiration strikes, you just have to go for it.

I thank you for looking. Be well.♡