Patient Newsletter: September 2023
A Flu Update, NEW Walk-In Hours,
and What Puzzled Me This Summer
Dear Patients and Friends,
Well, it happened again.
A glorious summer has come and gone. So, here I sit trying to overcome melancholy to compose a poignant, informative, and at times, funny newsletter.
But, frankly, mentally, I am just not feeling it. At. All.
Physically, I am holed up in my home office upstairs. The house is SILENT. I have texted in our family group chat three times today (always poignant, informative, and funny) and have gotten ZERO responses.
In fact if it wasn’t for Chris’s sympathy texts, I would wonder if they were going through. I would wander around the house checking the strength of my signal. Are my boxes blue? Do they say “delivered?” Then those thoughts would give way to a mental spiral that would place Maisy (NYC) and/or Sam (North Philly) in an emergency room without their phones. Haddie’s silence — I get. She is in school and can’t really look at her phone most of the day (or so I tell myself.) But the other two…? How long does it take to send a 👍 or 😆 or “hahahah mom you are the 🐐?”
Anyway, I am blah and thinking a lot about the amazing time we had together this summer.
Don’t get me wrong. We spent a lot of time apart — our kids each had trips with friends without us. But in between, we did lots of “NOTHING MUCH” together.
One of my favorite stretches of days came over Fourth of July. Everyone except Sam’s girlfriend, Mia (she was in Uganda literally changing the world) was there. I mean we had a FULL house. There were bodies sprawled in every corner. It was chaos and laughter and just fun.
In between, we all collectively worked on this puzzle. We spent hours, days, weeks on it. It became the center point of the summer. It just sat on the table inviting anyone and everyone to try their hand at it.
When the house cleared out, the last of the puzzle was left for Sam and I. Sidebar: You will be shocked to learn this about me, but I am a little obsessively competitive and just had to see it to the end.
I stayed up to the wee hours, night after night, fitting the last fistful of pieces into place.
But just as I was finishing up, terror overtook me.
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