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Twelve Words (kenyonreview.org)
88 points by badcede on Sept 14, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



In June the hospital decided he had aged-out of pediatrics and transferred him to adult care, where the doctors and nurses were not trained to deal with severely disabled patients—because they didn’t usually live this long and because, to be honest, they were not profitable. The doctors and nurses botched routine procedures but blamed the hole in his gut on the group-home nurses. Everyone disavowed responsibility, which did nothing to close the hole.

My mother stared down at the age spots on her hands. “I want him to die with dignity,” she said. “I want to save him from future pain. They’ll tech him out. They’ll torture him. I think I’m just quitting and he’s not, but that’s not true. He’s ready to go, too.” Her voice broke. “I just feel like I’m killing my child.”

It's a very poignant piece about a family with a severely medically disabled member as told by his twin brother.


This was unbelievably beautiful, thank you for sharing it.


Holy cow, I was not expecting that. Thank you.


Yeah... been spending most of a lazy day reading random HN comment threads and the article if it seemed interesting enough, and then read this one. Powerful stuff.


Deeply touching. Thank you.


All comments to this post should be exactly twelve words long. Agreed?


FYI, because it is not at all clear from the title, this is a story about recovering from a serious brain injury.


lol that is the worst tldr ever. It is about someone born with profound retardation due to brain injury and who later dies due to his disability as an adult, and the attempt of his brother to communicate with him.

but i thought it had something to do with crypto currency seeds


Why was this downvoted?

This is correct, parent provides clearly wrong information. And yeah, I thought this was going to be the 12word thing cryptos use, as well.

Ended up in tears, instead.


Some people can't seem to differentiate between calling people the r-word out of the left field and the medical use (out-dated use or not).

It's silly to get outraged about that, yet 'imbecile', 'idiot' and 'moron' are somewhat acceptable.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/moron-idiot-im...


It's not PC to use the r-word nowadays, it really offends some people with non neurotypical folks in their families.


if i had a dollar for every stupid, unjustified downvote i would probably be able to buy a bitcoin


I expected the article to be about geolocation.


ty.




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