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Showing posts with the label only child

Death is Never Funny, Especially If You're the Deathee

His name was Tulip, and he had a terminal, incurable disease. Some kind of a horrible cat virus called Feline Something. I've never been good about learning the names of killer diseases--unlike my sister who insisted she was plagued with a bunch of them all through college and those fun years when she was raising her kids. It forced her to give up her dream of becoming "Cherry Ames, RN," For those of you too young to remember Cherry Ames, she was a drop-dead gorgeous nurse in  a series of young adult books in the '50s. My sister read all those books at least ten times, and they motivated her to go to nursing school and become a cruise nurse, a school nurse, a corporate nurse and a bunch of other life-saving roles. Obsessing about rare and incurable diseases distracted her from mapping out her career plans so  she had to table not only nursing school but all  other related health areas like phlebotomist and ear piercer. Just the sight of blood was enough to make he