Memories of a White Girl
an excerpt

Right after that, I got sick. It started out as a head cold, but then it went down into my chest and turned into bronchitis. I coughed and coughed until it felt like my ribs were broken, even though Mom kept giving me teaspoons of cough syrup. I couldn’t seem to shake it. Then I got a fever. I lost my appetite and couldn’t eat, even though Mom tried to tempt me with my favourites, like homemade clam chowder. I’d always had a wiry build without a lot of fat on me, so when I stopped eating, I just started to waste away. Finally, they had Dr. Walker come up to the house to take a look at me. This was back in the days when doctors still made house calls. I hardly remember any of this, because I was so out of it, but apparently Dr. Walker took one look at me and said to get me up to the hospital immediately because I had “nuh-monia.”
I remember that part, him saying “nuh-monia.”

Later on, up at the hospital, I peeked at my chart and saw that they had written “pneumonia.” That was when I realized that the pneumonia that I had read about in novels, but pronounced “pew-monia” in my head, was really the spelling for “nuh-monia” that I had always heard people talking about. That is one of the problems with being a precocious reader; sometimes you get the pronunciation of words wrong. The other weird thing that I noticed on my chart was that they spelled my name wrong – “Deidre” instead of “Deirdre.” It turned out it was Dad’s mistake. He had brought me up to the hospital to check me in while Mom stayed at home with the kids, and he spelled my name wrong. Later, when I called him on it, he said that he had been so upset and worried about me being sick with pneumonia, that he hadn’t been thinking straight. Okay, but really! A dad who can’t spell his own daughter’s name right!