sadness

I met Stacy in 2003. She had been stonebender's morning
attendant for a couple years by then, and it's hard to describe to someone
who hasn't dealt with attendant care how much of a treasure she is. She
came every day. On time. She did her work with barely any direction, and
she became a member of the family and a part of the Gilly-parenting team
(the permissive aunt, if you ask me).

She's never been told explicitly who I am to stonebender, so I
didn't spend a ton of time around her (so I wouldn't have to worry about
being circumspect), but I've always suspected she knows.

Stacy immediately took a liking to me (and my hair!) and asked about me
often; I think she's excellent in many ways. When she got sick, we sat by
in frustration as doctor after doctor failed to explain/diagnose/treat her
illnesses in satisfactory ways. She was misdiagnosed at least three
times, and she eventually was in so much pain that she quit her job, which
she could not afford to quit. She is poor and uneducated, and I suspect
she had difficulty navigating the kind of hardcore advocacy that patients
need to display these days just to get baseline care.

Anyway, she's really ill now -- terminal cancer -- and I am mute with
frustration. I keep typing a sentence and deleting it, typing and
deleting, because there are no words for how fucked up this is.

She's not much older than I am. She should've gotten so much more from the
people who were supposed to be taking care of her.

(no subject)

The bottoms of the cream puffs are a little overdone again. I need to either pull them out sooner (possibly unwise) or move them up in the oven. Or maybe I should bake them a little cooler. I dunno. Any of you make cream puffs? The pate a choux recipe I use is more butter-heavy than most, so maybe I should try decreasing the butter, wrong as that sounds. :-)