Nursing Aide Fights for Her Life by Harvesting Lessons Learned Caretaking Oldsters
When Kyong Ah Choi, mender of broken bodies and minds, coughs up a blood clot resembling a chunk of Dead Husband’s liver, she smothers panic with cigarettes and memory of a patient who staged his own Kevorkian. Dodging her kids—Yumi the hater, Mickey the boozer, and Sally the lesbian sex toy store clerk—she shuttles between work and the county hospital where Oakland’s shot, maimed, and uninsured lean away from her TB-like hacking. After a North-Korean-missile-sized biopsy needle disgorges its payload, the aide must marshal enough breaths to outwit a killer that copycats the ingenuity of its immigrant host.
Reviews
“In Not Contagious—Only Cancer, Kyong Ah Choi can read body fluids with the skill of a trained coroner. A nurse’s aide in a Skilled Nursing Facility, Kyong Ah tends to every need of her dying patients: decoding their grunts, changing their soiled diapers, and negotiating for their favorite foods. Overworked, underpaid, and without benefits, she is a champion of life, mixing cigarettes, Korean food, and folk medicine to care for others and for herself. In this lively, bittersweet, and comic novel, writer Miriam Ching Yoon Louie plunges us into the breathless momentum of Kyong Ah’s world as she negotiates uneven relationships with her three children, wards off the ghost of her cheating ex-husband, and schemes to manage her illness compromised by systems and insufficient medical care. The dialogue pops with utterances, beneath the breath rumbles, and secret messages to the dead. Not Contagious—Only Cancer drives relentlessly from beginning to end, bringing a satisfying mash-up of pain, love, concern, amusement and compassion. Each of the small chapters drops a seed of wisdom and insight that coalesces into an instructional guide on self-care that allows hope for life and honor for death.”
—Elmaz Abinader, author of This House, My Bones
When Kyong Ah Choi, mender of broken bodies and minds, coughs up a blood clot resembling a chunk of Dead Husband’s liver, she smothers panic with cigarettes and memory of a patient who staged his own Kevorkian. Dodging her kids—Yumi the hater, Mickey the boozer, and Sally the lesbian sex toy store clerk—she shuttles between work and the county hospital where Oakland’s shot, maimed, and uninsured lean away from her TB-like hacking. After a North-Korean-missile-sized biopsy needle disgorges its payload, the aide must marshal enough breaths to outwit a killer that copycats the ingenuity of its immigrant host.
Reviews
“In Not Contagious—Only Cancer, Kyong Ah Choi can read body fluids with the skill of a trained coroner. A nurse’s aide in a Skilled Nursing Facility, Kyong Ah tends to every need of her dying patients: decoding their grunts, changing their soiled diapers, and negotiating for their favorite foods. Overworked, underpaid, and without benefits, she is a champion of life, mixing cigarettes, Korean food, and folk medicine to care for others and for herself. In this lively, bittersweet, and comic novel, writer Miriam Ching Yoon Louie plunges us into the breathless momentum of Kyong Ah’s world as she negotiates uneven relationships with her three children, wards off the ghost of her cheating ex-husband, and schemes to manage her illness compromised by systems and insufficient medical care. The dialogue pops with utterances, beneath the breath rumbles, and secret messages to the dead. Not Contagious—Only Cancer drives relentlessly from beginning to end, bringing a satisfying mash-up of pain, love, concern, amusement and compassion. Each of the small chapters drops a seed of wisdom and insight that coalesces into an instructional guide on self-care that allows hope for life and honor for death.”
—Elmaz Abinader, author of This House, My Bones