MSI Press Blog

  I never imagined that the squabbles of my childhood would be needed as an adult. But they have been. I was a tomboy. There was no question about that. My favorite place was in the upper branches of the apple tree in the front orchard, and my best friends were all boys. That might have colored how I related to the world as a kid, and I do mean as a kid. The first major altercation, according to my mother, was with my friend Bobby, who was more than a tad taller than I (he became captain of the high school football and basketball teams) and just a tad (one year) older. We were pals then--and all the way through school. But we had an altercation. As my mother tells it, Bobby had a candy bar, and I had an ice cream cone. As our parents were gabbing to each other on the city street, I offered Bobby a lick of my ice cream cone. He was very happy for that lick. I asked for a bite of his candy bar, and he was not happy with that kind of sharing. But lick for bite, it should have been a f...

When we moved to California, we had to find the right school for Doah. He had specific learning issues. He had certain behavioral issues, and he had certain physical issues. The automatic placement by a school system tends to be the course of least resistance, not always the best course for the child. Lizzie visited every classroom that might have been selected for Doah, once we learned that the planned one certainly did not meet our expectations. She found the ideal classroom and a very talented teacher, who happened to be the wife of the superintendent, but it was not on the normal bus route for our neighborhood. We met with the superintendent and a special education committee. Our point was that if they were going to have to send a bus to our house anyway, we were already in a non-route, special bus situation, so why could it not take Doah to the program that was most appropriate for him. There was considerable pushback because it was not the way they usually did things.  I took...

Courage is usually described in battlefield terms — the charge forward, the split‑second decision, the willingness to risk one’s life. But for veterans exposed to Agent Orange, courage took on a different shape. It became a long, quiet practice: the courage to live with uncertainty, to face diagnoses that arrived decades after service, and to keep building a life even when the future felt fragile. 1. The Courage of Knowing What Might Come For many veterans, the first act of courage was simply absorbing the truth. Learning that a chemical they barely noticed in Vietnam could cause cancer, heart disease, neuropathy, or Parkinsonism required a kind of emotional steadiness that few people ever need to summon. It meant living with the knowledge that: bad news could arrive at any time, symptoms might appear without warning, and the body might carry a danger planted years earlier. This is not fearlessness. It is the courage of continuing anyway — of going to work, raising children, paying bi...

  I recently told a pulmonologist that Doah—now nearly forty‑seven—entered this world with a zero percent chance of survival stamped on his chart. That was the official medical verdict. The unofficial one was harsher: the doctors called me immature for refusing to accept that he would die. They insisted that hope was denial, that advocacy was naïveté, and that my unwillingness to surrender him to their predictions made me the problem. Their solution was to remove him from me entirely. They tried to take custody so they could perform experimental procedures his own pediatrician warned were dangerous and unlikely to help in any meaningful way. The message was unmistakable: If you won’t give up on him, then we will take him from you so we can. I did what any mother who knows her child better than a prognosis would do. I removed him from the hospital, gathered what little we had, and took him out of state. The doctors we found there were not optimistic either—but they were willing ...