The attending team at the urgent care facility in south Overland Park whisked me out of the facility as soon as they saw my complaint. My calf was swollen, red, hot, and painful. I could hardly walk. The doctor suspected deep-vein thrombosis, a life-threatening condition if the clot they thought was in my lower leg broke free and traveled to the heart or lungs.
One CommentAuthor: Patrick Dobson
Dr. Patrick Dobson is a work in progress until his termination. In the meantime, He is a writer, scholar, postman, and college professor living in Kansas City, MO.
The University of Nebraska Press published his travel memoirs, Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer in 2015 and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains in 2009. Canoeing the Great Plains won the 2016 High Plains Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. His essays and poems have been published in New Letters, daCunha, Kansas City Star, Garo, Wood Coin, and JONAHmagazine, and others.
Dobson earned a doctorate in American History and Literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. He has edited books, taught journalism, and been a union ironworker. He now teaches American History, Modern Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.
He looks forward to hearing from you soon.
On days like this, my thoughts turn to the hydrogen bomb. My mind doesn’t linger on the holocaust the use of such weapons would mean. Instead, I’m thinking of it as a kind of motivational tool, a fatalist’s lament over the way the world works. The bomb is there. It’s rusting away in its silo, connected to an obsolete set of computer controls. There are madmen about who believe the bomb adds to their cumulative power. I don’t know that I’ve stopped worrying about the bomb but I know that I’ve come to love it.
Leave a CommentWhen I was a kid, I used to lay on the front lawn and stare for hours into the blue. I don’t remember how old I was, Cub Scout age probably. The vastness of the sky above me fascinated me. I believed in God then.
Leave a CommentWhen no one would hire me, the United States Postal Service did. Now I begin the life of a city carrier assistant, not the friendly neighborhood letter carrier, but the sub picking up the regular letter carrier’s route. It’s a tough job, and I may not make it. But it connects me with my past and in many ways is a job made for me.
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