ABSTRACT
Mom was still groggy from anesthesia when we got home on a Saturday afternoon and Dad told her the visiting nurses would be coming later on. Not so groggy that she couldn’t protest, though. “I don’t need a nurse,” she announced, and demanded to know, “Who asked them to come?” She hated the whole idea. I, on the other hand, was secretly titillated, for I was thick into a research project on home healthcare. It took all my willpower to refrain from doing fi eld research on my mother, but I managed to honor her privacy for the entire two hours the nurse stayed in her bedroom. Th e instant the nurse was out the door, I couldn’t wait to ask Mom, “How was it? What did she do?”
