"Despair is Everywhere": Dispatches from the Real World

If you read my blog, you know that I work in the health care field; when I'm not parenting and writing horror novels, I'm an MRI technologist, which is as close as I'll ever come to medical school.

I come by the vocation fairly: I grew up in and around hospitals and hearing OR stories at the dinner table. My father is a retired surgeon. He worked for forty plus years in general and vascular surgery, and a couple years ago he retired from practice.

Now he works for Doctors Without Borders, and at the moment he's working with a handful of other surgeons and anesthesiologists down in Sri Lanka. If you've been reading the news lately at all, you know it's not going well down there, not just for the government but civilians and foreign aid workers as well. My dad doesn't have much access to computers or the internet, but tonight I received an email from him.

"Conditions here are undescribable. It is a little better now that many have been transferred away. Still there are many patients without beds. Despair is everywhere."

My dad is due back stateside in a few weeks. I haven't seen him since February. My family and I are planning to fly out to his home in Washington State in June to visit and catch up -- to hear in more detail about what he's experienced down there. And while I'll obviously be very happy to sit down and see him, I'll be even happier just to know that he's back safely.

I write horror and suspense by choice, and every so often it's good to be reminded of the schism that separates fiction and reality -- what's cathartic and entertaining, in other words, versus the forces of tension and (let's face it) terror operating in the wider world.

These are things that fiction can't protect us from. All we have is each other.