Chapter Forty-Two #2
I flip open the first folder. Mom is notorious for holding on to everything.
My fingers brush past birthday cards and childhood drawings and old report cards.
Garbage, garbage, and more garbage. Dust puffs into my face, and I cough.
Not good for my asthma, but I’m too wound up to care.
I reach for a giant accordion folder stuffed with papers.
My chest tightens to see it again. Mom used to lug this thing around back when I was little.
She’d save every scrap—medical notations, invoices, prescription duplicates.
Inside, I find folders labeled with my name and dates spanning several years of my childhood.
The records inside chart my roller-coaster health history, and for the first time in my life, I’m ready to face it: I want to see the details of my cancer—the diagnosis, the treatment, the recurrence.
I drop cross-legged on the floor as I spread out the documents around me.
I extract a bundle of yellowing papers from the file, and I recognize Nonna’s careful, spindly handwriting.
A record of doctor visits for the first three years of my life, including immunizations, growth charts, and a few minor illnesses.
A typical child’s medical history. Ear infections, strep, stomach flu.
My percentiles for height and weight are consistent.
Flipping through the pages, I search for any mention of the word cancer or related terms: malignancies, tumors, atypical masses.
It feels surreal sifting through faded documents to piece together my own health history, like I’m reading about someone else’s life.
The Josie Greene who, at eighteen months, reportedly knew “far more than the benchmark number of words,” according to one doctor’s visit.
Still, no evidence of sickness. Of course, I just haven’t fast-forwarded far enough into the future. I was six the first time I was diagnosed…I think? That’s when we went to Supercuts and shaved off all my hair.
So why does it feel like there’s a piece of the story missing?
One document catches my eye—a doctor’s note that’s annotated in red with a sense of urgency, explaining that our health insurance denied further testing and that the doctors had already gone above and beyond the typical protocol for an earache.
But it’s my mother’s familiar handwriting in the margins, anxious and insistent.
I’m sure something is wrong, she wrote. Mother’s intuition!
A follow-up letter from the same doctor suggests my mother seek an alternative primary care physician for me. That we were no longer welcome in the practice.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to remember an earache. When did Mom get in an argument with a doctor about my care? Nothing comes to mind.
I delve deeper, and my cheeks go hot as I follow a trail of my mother’s anxiety. Her notes are frantic, desperate, overshadowing the calm reassurances of medical professionals.
A particular report catches my eye, and my stomach tightens.
The note details a series of particularly aggressive tests—some of the most painful procedures I can barely allow myself to remember.
The word leukemia stares out at me from the pages, as if highlighted in neon.
Dr. Don, a name that sends a shiver through me, is mentioned frequently throughout the notes.
I think of his curdled smile, his dry, papery fingers, his insistence that I take off all my clothes for a checkup.
I pull out my phone and enter his full name into the search engine: Dr. Donald M.
Rogers. I didn’t know his last name; I only knew him as Dr. D or Dr. Don, like we were pals.
And when the results load, I’m not even slightly surprised: a splashy malpractice suit was filed against Dr. Rogers by families accusing him of diagnosing and treating illnesses that were, at best, dubious.
I read a formal public notice from the medical board detailing how Dr. Rogers was stripped of his license due to unethical practices, but by then he’d made millions overdiagnosing his pediatric patients and subjecting them to experimental treatments.
But that’s not the part that chills me to my bones. The lawsuit and the revocation of his license happened more than two decades ago.
I was his patient after the class action suit was settled.
What the fuck was my mother thinking? Why would she take me to a charlatan? Was I that close to death? Were we so desperately out of options?
I dig deeper into his record. After Dr. Don left the traditional medical world with a badly tarnished reputation, he reinvented himself as an “alternative medicine specialist,” slipping through a loophole in FDA regulations through a private practice that he called Miracle Solutions.
My blood surges when I find a photograph online of the building I came to know as MS Hospital, where I spent the worst days of my childhood.
It was in Pottstown, Pennsylvania—and felt like a thousand miles from home.
I never once thought about what it looked like from the outside—just a squat concrete box—probably because I spent so much time trapped inside.
Now it’s like a protective barrier has broken down in my mind and I remember it all: the shared room, the revolving door of young roommates, our nighttime cries echoing off the walls, the bedpans filled with puke, and that ever-present smell of sickness.
The more I read about Dr. Don, the worse it gets. My skin is prickling all over now, a million tiny needles on my skin, my legs are shaking, and I have to put my head between my knees to breathe.
As I let the memories flood back, I’m struck by the stark horror of those days.
How many gruesome experiences I’ve suppressed.
I remember when a girl in the wing, Isla, just twelve, died in the bed next to mine.
Her body lay there through the dark hours of the night, untouched until morning light when there was a shift change.
Her parents, unaware until then, arrived and mourned over her still form, their grief echoing down the sterile halls.
How could I have forgotten Isla, with her soulful eyes and bunny teeth? How did I not relive the sheer horror of hearing her mother’s keening? How could any of us have accepted this as normal?
I type Miracle Solutions Rogers Pediatric into my phone and learn that in the five years he operated it, Dr. Don marketed the place as a groundbreaking clinic offering alternative and holistic cancer therapies and targeted desperate families who had been failed by conventional medicine.
The treatments included unapproved drug regimens, experimental procedures, Reiki, and natural herbal supplements.
All untested. Mostly junk science. There’s a detailed exposé in The Philadelphia Inquirer with a cover image of Dr. Don grinning at the camera in his doctor’s coat, a stethoscope looped around his neck.
When I see his face, I have to run to the bathroom to vomit.
Curled over the toilet, I shake as my body relives every nightmarish appointment with the evil man.
Dr. Don stabbing a hypodermic needle into my arm.
Dr. Don, with a smile, asking me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten while I was in too much agony to even answer.
Dr. Don leaving me to lie in my own piss and shit for hours until the nurses came on shift.
My mother must’ve still been reeling from my father’s death, making her an easy target for a shady doctor promising a miracle when regular medicine failed to immediately cure my leukemia.
Dr. Don made it sound like he had the key to something groundbreaking, and in her fear, she believed him.
That’s the only way I can make sense of it.
I dig back into the files, and this time, I extract a worn envelope caught under the flap of cardboard at the bottom of the file.
Brittle with age, addressed to Nonna, it’s from the year my father died.
Carefully, I open it and pry out the letter tucked inside.
The handwriting is familiar—Mom’s again.
As I unfold the letter, a wave of apprehension washes over me.
So far every revelation has been worse than the last.
Dear Mama Rosa,
I know these past months have been hard on us all with Harry’s passing.
Even though your visits are fewer than I’d like, I’ve received good care here and I am much better.
The doctors think that I will soon finally be ready to come home.
I worry what my staying too long at this place will do to the baby.
Come home? When was Mom away from me?
I check the return address on the envelope.
Sharon Goggins Greene
275 Holloway Road
Shelton, PA 19320
Wait, 275 Holloway Road? I know that address. It’s the address for Ravenswood. The now-shuttered psychiatric facility—aka the House of Horrors.
What the fuck? When did my mother live at Ravenswood?
No wonder she can’t even drive by the place. Numbly, I keep reading:
Nighttime is the hardest. I lie in bed, trapped in my mind and body, thinking about Harry. And Josie. And the life we were supposed to have together.
I am not going to lie to you. I am also very scared to leave, Rosa.
But I miss Josie so much. I feel that if we are reunited, I will be better.
She will cure me. That is what babies do.
They are little miracles. Next Sunday, when you see me, they are going to let you sign for my release.
Rosa, you know it is the right thing to do.
Harry would want you to do this for me. I should not be kept one more month from my precious little girl, especially with Harry gone.
I will love her and keep her so safe and healthy with every cell in my body.
Love,
Sharon
This is all too much.
I need the truth. The real truth.
I need to see Nonna.