Middlesex+(401-439)

Definitions: Etruscans: Etruscans is the modern name given to a civilization in ancient Italy near Tuscany. The ancient Romans called its creators the Tusci or Etrusci. Their Roman name is the origin of the terms Tuscany, which refers to the heartland, and Etruria, which can refer to the wider region. Is distiguished by its unique language. The civilization endured from about 700-100 B.C. and it flourished in three confederacies of cities. []

Klebs:Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs was a German-Swiss pathologist primarily known for his work on infectious diseases. In 1883 he successfully identified the etiological cause of diphtheria. []

Describe a time when a particular word became important to you. Was there a situation that made it so? Or was there a time when you felt limited by words and wished that you could make up a word to describe the way you were feeling? The term serum sickness was not familiar to me until I had an auto-immune response to the drug tetracycline. I had had allergic reactions to other medications before so the situation was not new, but the severity of serum sickness was something completely different, something that I wasn't ready for. The hives from head to toe, the joint swelling, the inability to operate independently made my life a living hell during the week that I was ill. My episode with serum sickness indicated that I am allergic to all of the cyclines in addition to the cillin and sulfa drugs that I had reacted to when I was younger. This prompted my mother to purchase a medic alert bracelet because if I were to ingest any of these medicines again serum sickness or worse could occur. Since it is nearly impossible to test someone for allergies to medications, I do not know what medicines I can take should I happen to become ill. While initially I was unaware that such a thing as serum sickness even existed, it has greatly impacted my life and has severely limited my options should I become sick enough to require medicinal treatment. Such uncertainty is extremely worrisome to me because I do not want to experience serum sickness ever again.

4/7 "Tessie was reaming a family dream. A version of the nightmares Desdemona had after listening to Fard's sermons. //Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling, dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam.// Tessie didn't allow herself to think about such things during the day, so they came to her at night. Was it her fault? Should she have resisted Milton when he tried to bend nature to his will? Was there really a God after all, and did He punish people on earth? These Old World superstitions had been banished from my mother's conscious mind, but they still operated in her dreams" (423). Just as Desdemona worried about the consequences and punishment for her incestuous marriage, so Tessie worries about the potential for consequences for Callie and the Stephanides family. It is a circle, history is once again repeating itself through Tessie as she worries about the consequences attached to her daughter's condition.