A Fish in the Moonlight: Growing Up in the Bone Marrow Unit (Purdue University Press, June 2008)
Available from Amazon.
[from the book jacket blurb]
Sidney Homan is a storyteller. He tells tales of growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s–accounts of Bruzzy the Bully, of John Crapp, the television salesman, of Leslie Doober and his rotten banana, of drunken Uncle Eddie, and of the Queen of the mushrooms.
His eager listeners are children caught up in the unreal world of the bone marrow unit. The children hear these stories in terms of their present lives. Homan forges friendships as he meets children coping with the challenge of disease, and the storyteller becomes an actor in their theater to draw the patients into his world.
Sometimes comic, sometimes bittersweet, A Fish in the Moonlight illuminates the growth of both storyteller and listener. While technology can work wonders, the miracle of comfort can come in simple reflections and connections. The moment of the story itself can be medicine enough.