The first challenge in a writing class designed to help me find my voice involved identifying characters and setting from a memorable time in my life. Using good old pen and paper, I described the second house I lived in and my older sister, who ruled her neighborhood gang like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, the female warrior I remember from television in the fifties. Although we were estranged later for many years, my sister influenced major life choices, from my career to my single adulthood.
I may have been only five or six, but I worshipped my sister and looked for ways I could be like her. In the process, I found ways I could not, because I didn’t have the same talents. I hoped proximity would allow me to absorb even traces of the things I admired. A five-year age gap between my sister and me, cultural mobility, and unknowns I can’t remember allowed us to drift apart.
Then my sister developed breast cancer. My yearly mammogram evolved into the most painful, degrading, frightening, “routine” exam. Her diagnosis reclassified me from normal to high risk. The dread grew exponentially every year as my appointment date neared.
Perhaps that explains why, while waiting for my mammogram this year, I developed a case of tunnel vision. Once I checked in, I sat in morgue silence. Stress percussed the beat of my heart inside my head. While others focused on their phones or tablets, the only things I noticed in my physical proximity were feet.
To my left, thin tan sandals with a jeweled strap over the instep hugged delicate feet with nails manicured a peach yogurt pink. The hem of white capri pants stopped the extension of lightly tanned skin to the ankle strap. To my right, cheap patent leather white straps arched from between the great and second toes to the back of sole of the flip-flop. Thickly applied, white acrylic nail polish made the toes look fake, like those of a doll I had when I was a child. Across from me, a “safe distance” away, two feet were ensconced in yellow hued suede ankle boots. Too hot for August. I thought.
I bent my left leg and rested my ankle on my right knee to inspect my shoes. When new, white canvas provided the background for white leather mountains capped by purple peaks. I used a skate hook to tie the purple laces tight enough to keep my right ankle from rolling outward, which it had done since 6th grade. The thick soles added an inch to my height and kept knee pain at bay. After a year of working out in these shoes, the white turned gray. The waffled tread on the soles flattened. Like a breast in the machine.
To my surprise, a man checked in for testing. He wore traditional black work shoes, laced, with the leather scuffed and bulging in places from wear. Because of his gender, I looked up, looked at his chest. He wore an ordinary light shirt with short sleeves and a button-down collar. His chest, flat as any other man’s, led me to wonder why he needed the same abuse as I or any of the other women did.
My vision expanded to body types. I’d read about the relationship between weight and different cancers. From a group of five, two were voluptuous and round as Rubens’ nudes. Two moved across the room, lean and lithe as small trees in a gentle breeze. I walked, sturdy, muscled, with a small spare tire, the middle woman, the one caught in the middle of chance, weighted by a positive family history.
A technician called my name. I navigated toward her. I thought of the day my sister beat up the boy from across the street. I remembered the day, years later, when I broke months of silence and called her. “Mom told me you had breast cancer. Tell me how I can help.” Statistics say one in ten women develop breast cancer. Had my sister intervened with Fate on my behalf? In some other dimension, had the great gamemaster in the sky pictured me and my sister in a circle with eight other women where my sister insisted “Take me”?
My mind wavers between cruelty and compassion; it replays the “what ifs” and reassures with platitudes, “Surely not you.” Because my sister is a survivor, I can imagine the worst and hope for the best. In my mind, she remains the warrior queen and gives me strength.
TMI
I paced around the house yesterday trapped in a conundrum of my own design and complicated by the crises going on in the world. I wandered from the newspaper, to reading, to the computer, back to reading, to staring out the window, asking myself how the world devolved to a place filled with vitriol, disdain for life, and measuring greatness by wealth, not of heart, but of commerce.
Yesterday forced me to become proactive today.
First, I thirty-day-snoozed someone on FB who posted nothing but rants about her one-sided view of injustices in this world. When I mentioned the devaluing of women in our society, she responded that we had to focus on black skin. Why? If all are not afforded the same equality, where is justice? Why did I have to accept when, as a young woman, I was told my opinions were valid, but I didn’t put them politely enough? Why did I have to be warned not to jog alone because I would be asking for “it”? We all know what “it” is. Why is age discrimination less valid than any other? Every person of age, regardless of color, will face it. I’m sure if I had explained my frustration when Kaepernick took the knee for police brutality but not for the female victims of his fellow athletes’ abuse, I would have been told I didn’t understand. When is brutality not brutality? When it’s black man on black woman?
A few days previously, this same person cursed and slandered health care professionals for trying to treat her holistically, with a thorough knowledge of all possible health issues, which caused a delay in her surgery. Having worked in a law office interviewing possible clients, I am sure she would have sued if anything went wrong because those same professionals didn’t investigate, didn’t delay, just forged ahead with an incomplete history.
Yesterday, charges were upgraded for one and brought against three police officers involved in the killing of George Floyd. Today, on FB, this same person continued to spew anger, document atrocities, and stir non-productive emotions.
I don’t feel the need to snooze people very often, but when the negativity outweighs the sharing of information, when it stops me, rather than helps me see things from the other side, when I suspect the tone will never change and will damage rather than advance a cause, I must.
There is an upshot. I plan to conscientiously limit my screen time except for writing.
I am forcing myself to leave the house, with caution, of course. A combination of the emotional beating from too much information and the weight of the heat and humidity imposed on this sixty-eight-year old body is sending me to the gym. Oh, I’ll maintain my anonymity. A mask is as good a cover as a FB avatar. I’ll workout, watch L&O:SVU reruns, and give myself a break from the confines of the living room, the kitchen, the mess that is my work space, the neighborhood where I am the woman with the purple cane and the clumsy gait who figure eights around the blocks to cover ten thousand steps. I will give myself a break from death tolls, brutality, judgements, accusations, venting with no plan or purpose, pundits celebrating the Dow amid the dual threat to America, a carnival barker posing as a leader, and my own shame at not knowing what to do to facilitate change.
Has Medical Specialization and the Business Model in Health Care Given Rise to Google, MD?
As a nurse, my family sought my advice over the years. I never practiced medicine without a license and stuck mainly to my specialty, Cardiovascular Nursing. If people asked me about pregnancy, I used the line “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthin’ no babies.” I learned more about labor and delivery from Call the Midwives than I did from a clinical rotation forty some years ago.
With time, my advice took second chair to a new pundit, the internet. My mom asked me things, I advised, she argued. She would quote something she “Googled.” When a close relative developed cancer, she prepared for long distance care at a Cancer Treatment Center she read about until I reassured her that for her type of cancer, therapy at home would be more than satisfactory.
I agreed with the doctors at work who disdained Dr. Google or Google, MD. But then I had easy access to talented professionals amenable to “curbside consults.” I felt light-headed at work one day. I mentioned it to a colleague, a cardiologist. I had a stress test within a week.
Now that I have retired, I experience patienthood in an entirely new way. It started with a little light-headedness. No. Not a little. A lot. Bad enough to call 911. The red ambulance rolled up with lights flashing. I never felt so relieved as I did when the gurney rolled into the foyer of the fitness center. By the time they did a blood pressure, a blood sugar, an O2 sat, and looked at my EKG, I felt better, well enough to go to the bathroom and drive myself home.
I did what I would have told anyone. I went to my PCP the next day. He drew labs and did an EKG. My heart rate was, hold it, take it in, thirty-six. My heart had been bradycardic for years, but a rate below forty scared me. I’d been to a cardiologist before, so I called his office to schedule an appointment. When you imagine your heart might slow to a stop, you don’t want to wait around.
This is where the fun began. Despite the fact that I had seen this doctor and had a near “syncopal” episode, I hadn’t seen him often enough, so I was considered a new patient and couldn’t get an appointment for a month. Imagine me going to sleep at night with my index finger palpating my carotid artery to make sure my heart was still beating. Yup. That was me.
Thanks to Facebook and a few good friends and the fact that health care professionals treat each other like family, my appointment got moved up. I only had to wait a few days. My heart had to behave for a little while longer. However, I was warned that the doctor was extremely busy and that sixty patients were scheduled in the office that day. Whether you’re a nurse or a lay person, when it is your heart that is thinking about quitting, retiring from the rat race, going on hiatus, you don’t give a damn about anyone else’s problems whether it’s a cold sore or an office trying to make a buck.
When the doctor with whom I had worked for years walked in, I knew he recognized me, although he wasn’t sure from where. Yeah doc, I was the one who took care of all your very sick, high risk patients who agreed to participate in the trial of the procedure that revolutionized aortic valve repair. I worked hard with the unknowns and celebrated successes that changed the horizon for cardiac interventions. Guess what? I don’t give a damn about all that. I want you to NOT diagnose me in a five-minute office visit and exam. I want you to let me know you know all of my history, my MS, my anti-phospholipid syndrome, my meningioma, my very bad reflux, my hiatal hernia, the fact I have engaged in some sort of physical training since I was six years old. not just my heart history. But he chose the five-minute route. So, I went home and chatted with Google, MD.
Dr. Google mentioned sometimes a hiatal hernia can cause the exact same symptoms I was having, which was a relief, except it made me wonder if I should visit my GI doctor. I wondered if my meningioma was getting bigger and causing increased intracranial pressure and bradycardia. See my neurosurgeon? I wondered if I had thrown a clot to my lung again. Oh, did you not know about that? It’s on the paperwork, initially labeled incorrectly with someone else’s name. Call the pulmonologist. I had already done that.
You get my drift. In a perfect world, maybe all involved in my care could conference call and coordinate a plan. Since all my health care problems reside in one body, mine, maybe it would be helpful to consider them all before proceeding. Thanks to medical specialization and the business model of medicine, that will never happen. To be the best advocate for myself, I will draw from my experience, consult Dr. Google, and hope I make the right decisions.
My Heaven
I dreamed about heaven last night. Not Heaven, but my heaven. Some might call me a heathen. Questions and doubt gnaw at my beliefs. I know there comes a day in everyone’s life when they ask “Why?” or “Why me?” The days I ask myself those questions I surrender to faith in the inevitable, which may or may not involve a supreme being. I liken death to sleep. Except for nights when dreams unearth what’s really in my head, I slip from wakefulness, with my mind working at warp speed, jettisoning me into scenes or characters or action for the next story I want to tell, into nothingness. Black non-existence.
A young friend of mine, Amy, died this week. I think the loss of her made me dream of a heaven defined by more than a vacuous empty place. A hospital building housed my heaven. After forty-plus years of nursing that makes sense. I stood peering down a long hall of rooms where light spilled from the doorways and beckoned me to take a peek.
From one room I heard disco music and saw Rudy, a nurse who died from AIDs before it became a chronic illness. Rudy defined bling, not because he wore a lot of jewelry, but because he sparkled in life. He lived with an intensity from which a person who didn’t know him might have had to back away. His confidence, sense of humor, and frenetic energy rubbed off in a good way. I watched him dance in his pink uniform and thick soled white nursing shoes. He tossed his head back and a disco ball peppered his face with flickering freckles of light. I remembered the day Rudy confided in me about a patient who had commented on his sexual preference. “I told him at the end of his stay if I wasn’t the best damned nurse he had, he could say what he wanted.” When he was discharged, the patient praised the care he had received. I envied Rudy’s courage.
Amy had her own brand of endless energy. She engaged in everything she did with a full court press. She lived with joy, selflessness, compassion. She organized and commanded and executed any task at hand. She was both a jester and a fixer. When I moved into my new house, Amy suggested we have a pajama party. She appeared on my doorstep in flannel pajama bottoms, over-sized squishy slippers, and with rollers in her hair. She also brought the biggest margarita glasses I had ever seen and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms for my husband that said “I love chicks.” Hatching eggs with chicks peeping from the cracks dotted the fabric. I appreciated the time she took to share with us that day.
I’ll remember Amy for the night she saved my husband, Dalt. Hospitalized with tonsillitis, he received a huge dose of steroids for tonsils enlarged enough to compromise his airway. I settled him in bed and went home after a long day of waiting, tests, and more waiting. I had just arrived home and dried off from a shower when the phone rang. “There’s something wrong. Something’s happening.” I recognized the panic in my husband’s voice. I knew Amy was working in CVICU that night. I called her and told her the situation. “Can you check on him? I’ve got to get dressed and then I’ll be there.” I never expected her to say “no.” That just wasn’t how Amy treated people.
I anticipated a floor nurse in crisis mode when I arrived. But I walked in to find my husband smiling. What he said epitomized Amy. “Amy fixed everything.” During my twenty minute drive she had come to the room and discovered that a new graduate was taking care of my Dalt. “She made him check my blood sugar, my blood pressure, and made him give me some Xanax. She showed that new nurse a few things.”
Amy showed us all a few things. And we are better for it. Now Heaven will be, too.