Ross Douthat
speaker
328 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2022
last heard Mar 2022
Ross Douthat’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was another rainy morning.
I awoke with a stiff neck, and went to the bathroom to find a red swelling, a painful lymph node six inches down from my left ear.
I came out and sat on the bed, rubbing my neck and googling swollen lymph node on my phone.
My wife came in, behind me, her voice unusual.
Ross.
She was holding a pregnancy test, the telltale strip faint but clear.
Our third child.
It should have been another signifier that we were on the right path, on the upswing.
More kids, more life, more abundance.
But after I fist pumped and we embraced, after I said all the right excited things, after I went out into the rain to take our daughters to their nursery school in pre-K, my mind and fingers kept circling back to the discomfort on my neck.
I had seen a dermatologist for a wart the previous year, but he didn't have an appointment available for a week, and I was impatient.
I wanted the problem, however small, explained and resolved so that we could get back to basking in our triumphs.
So instead of waiting to see him, I went that day to the urban walk in clinic in the heart of Capitol Hill, walking through our dense neighborhood with its pocket parks and carefully controlled daubs of natural green, and let a young internist take a look.
It's just a boil, he said, after a cursory inspection.
Nothing to worry about.
He gave me a script for a few days of a mild antibiotic and sent me on my way.
Nothing to worry about was exactly what I wanted to hear.
The next two weeks were less soothing.
While we did paperwork and drove to Connecticut and back again, my neck began to feel intermittently stiff and painful, and I developed what felt like a vibration in my head.
Still, the original swelling shrank and disappeared, and I told myself that the strange feelings, the tension and the almost tremor, were probably stress induced, just all the life changes piling atop one another and giving me the jitters.
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