Author: Dennis Ritchie

I’ve always been a reader, ever since my two single aunts tired of the looks of disappointment from my brother and I when we opened their “useful” gifts of clothes. In frustration, they discovered John Blaine’s “Rick Brant SCIENCE Adventure” series. Yes, science was always capitalized and featured. In it, my aunts found a dependable, repeatable,  glee-inducing gift solution for their picky nephews and I discovered a fascination with science. They were kind of like Nancy Drew mysteries for boys with science and far-flung adventure thrown in. There were laser beams, rockets, radar dishes, submarines, and airplanes. The series inspired the Johnny Quest cartoons and probably Indiana Jones. The books always involved Rick, the son of a top-secret scientist, Scotty, a young marine, and a problem that could always be solved by science and some hard thinking. Always. Now you know more about me than is comfortable. Tech stuff attracted me and I probably have those books to thank for a career as a recording engineer. Too bad they didn’t involve computers or I’d be a billionaire by now. So, it was entirely predictable that I faced the possibility of my wife getting cancer with massive amounts of late night reading and research.  It started when Suzie’s mother and aunts were diagnosed and never stopped. No stone was left unturned. I was going to be prepared and brave and...

On the Monday morning after Thanksgiving, Suzie was sitting in a hospital hallway when she got the feeling that something was wrong. Donelson Hospital had so outgrown its facilities that even the halls served double duty. Plastic chairs lined one wall and the passage now functioned as an overflow waiting room. She felt naked in the hallway, dressed only in a breezy, three-sleeved, wraparound hospital gown and white socks. A diverse group of men and women were scattered down the corridor trying not to notice one another. Discretion was the only privacy to be found. Along the far wall were several patients lying on gurneys. Nurses and technicians threaded the gap in between. Suzie had already been admitted, stripped, prodded, sonogramed, and mammogramed. Now she was waiting to go home. She had been waiting too long. “Mrs. Ritchie?” a woman in scrubs called, leaning out of a doorway. She got up and sidled down the aisle, aware of the row of eyes watching her as she stepped through the door. “We need to run you through one more time,” she said as they walked back into radiology. This had never happened before. The tension must have shown on Suzie’s face because the tech immediately began reassuring her. “It’s not unusual. Nothing to worry about,” the woman said as she motioned her to the machine. “Sometimes the film gets smudged....