It’s a Saturday night as this gets posted. This poem by Sheila Boerner is titled “Dad and Daughter.” It’s from the current issue of Fine Lines. Boerner was an English teacher at St. Patrick’s Jr.-Sr. High School in North Platte, NE, for many years. Before that, she raised a family of six children.
In 1995, I suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. I was thirty-five years old, in the best shape of my life, and had just gotten a clean bill of health with an annual physical. The incident resulted in the need for a craniotomy, where a metal clip was strategically placed to stop the bleeding. The blood seeped into various parts of my brain, so once inside, a massive cleanup was required. Back then, micro-neurosurgery was a relatively new technique. Prior to that time, the most likely outcome was death. Given the same circumstances, odds for survival are only slightly better now.
