Free Raising Blaze by Debra Ginsberg

my father’s advice was tailor-made for Blaze because the one thing I was sure of was that Blaze really wasn’t like everybody else. I could even see it when I dropped him off at school and came to pick him up. Around the other kids, he even looked different, less solid somehow, as if his physical body wasn’t quite all there. To me, Blaze looked like a character from one of the old Star Trek episodes who was in the process of being transported to a new planet. He looked as if he hadn’t quite beamed in all the way, as if there were still parts of him floating through space. I’d leave him at school and he’d smile at me, watching me as I left, waiting patiently, I assumed, for transmissions from the mother ship.

[ Chapter 3 ]
THE GOOD DOCTORS
    M y relationship with those in the medical profession has long been an uneasy one. This stems partly from my parents, who have never liked or trusted doctors and have always had serious misgivings about the way most doctors practice medicine. My mother and father both had negative associations with the medical profession based on their own experiences and have never forgiven or forgotten. My mother had a grisly tale of a nearly botched tonsillectomy when she was a child. After the death of his own father in one, my father viewed hospitals as places where people went to die, not recover. An obstetrician pressured my parents into inducing labor when my mother was pregnant with her last child because he was afraid an approaching snowstorm would make travel to the hospital more difficult. My parents acquiesced and my sister was born a few hours later, not quite ready to come out, with a slightly underdeveloped liver that required two extra days in the hospital. Without ever explaining why, a series of gynecologists tried to convince my mother to have a hysterectomy after the birth of her last child. She was told that she would regret not having the surgery. Terrified, my mother got as far as the preoperative suite before climbing off the table and checking herself out of the hospital, never to return.
    When I was growing up, my parents transferred many of their misgivings to my siblings and me. Aside from clinic visits for immunizations, none of us ever visited a pediatrician. I didn’t go to a doctor for a physical, sick call, or checkup until I was an adult. My sisters and brother followed the same course. None of us took antibiotics until we were in our twenties. Most of us didn’t even know what antibiotics were until then. My father’s attitude was always clear. “Doctors are like mechanics,” he used to say. “If you take your car to a mechanic, he’ll find something wrong with it and if you go to a doctor, he’ll find something wrong with you. That’s his job.”
    Both my parents also believed that most ailments could be controlled by attitude and neither one of them was particularly tolerant of colds, flu, sprains or the like. “Get over it,” my father used to say. “Stop coughing.” I realize this sounds a little draconian in the telling. It wasn’t. My parents would never have denied any of their children medical attention if we needed it and we knew that. (When my brother had appendicitis, he went immediately to the hospital and when my sister fell out of a tree, nobody stopped on the way to the ER to question whether her leg was really broken.) However, we weren’t about to get extra attention and coddling if we got sick. My parents saved positive reinforcement for getting better or beating a cold before it turned into a fever.
    Long before it became trendy, my mother started exploring alternative methods of healing. Our kitchen cabinets were always stocked with homeopathic remedies, essential oils, and vitamins. She is the only woman I know who gave herself mustard plasters for catarrh (and honestly, who even knew what catarrh was?). Doctors, clinics, and hospitals were always a last resort.
    By their own admission, my parents were extremely lucky. Out of