Word: motherlies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...suitable for transplant is critically slim. But last week a team of surgeons at the University of Chicago Medical Center gave the little girl from Schertz, Texas, her chance to live. And what seemed truly miraculous about the operation was the source of Alyssa's new liver: her mother...
...both mother and daughter are doing well. Because the liver has the power to regenerate itself by forming new tissue, Teresa's liver should grow back to its normal size. Similarly, baby Alyssa's new liver should grow as she does...
...required a two-week delay between the time Teresa and her husband John signed the consent forms and the date of the transplant, so that the family could reconsider the decision. "It was purely voluntary," says Dr. Peter Whitington, a pediatric hepatologist on the transplant team. "I think this mother, even if she had greater complications, would believe she did the right thing. I believe this father, even if he lost his wife, would believe he did the right thing...
...they achieve an emotional bond -- a standard for hospital melodrama -- but in reveries rather than everyday contact. The patient becomes a stand-in for the nurse's dead mother; the nurse is transformed into the patient's long-lost sister, then an estranged daughter. The little dramas of hospital routine thus become freighted with the burdens of decades. Trivial exchanges achieve the dimensions of catharsis. Puig deftly interweaves other themes, including the oppression of all women under Latin machismo and the extent to which South Americans may still defensively see theirs as a colonial culture...
...differences in communication between characters are perhaps best represented by the role of Willy's wife Linda (Patricia Goldman). Goldman excellently portrays the confused wife whose final words at her husband's grave are "I don't understand," but she also gives an excellent performance as an angry mother whose sons have lost touch with their troubled father...