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.
AOC
This week I discovered I’m not too old to embrace a new hero, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after she rebuked Mr. Yoho for his misogynistic hostility. Finally, someone illuminated the subtle, accepted subjugation of women, verbal male judgement. Her speech on the floor of the House inspired this sixty-nine-year old, who gave up on modern young women having an interest in gender issues. Her words reminded me of an incident from over twenty-five years ago.
One Halloween I went to work wearing a Hillary Clinton mask. I know some reading this may think “Well that would scare anyone.” But it was during the Clinton years, a time when a sense of well-being flourished, generated by the charisma of an energetic president. Mrs. Clinton, I would never disrespect her by calling her Hillary without invitation, labored to propose a plan for universal health care. I’d read research about the cost benefits of health maintenance versus regaining health after a crisis. A study out of Cook county asserted that health maintenance was cheaper. I augmented my Clinton mask with hand printed IDs made from index cards and intended to pass them out instead of candy. I delighted in a clever costume spiced with a bit of politics. Where better to ponder the ailing condition of American health care than in a big city ICU?
In the break room, I bumped into a frequent antagonist, a short man with an arrogance matched only by a need to dominate and a skilled physician. I handed him a card. I never expected my crudely made prop to light a fuse. Our debate began. He ranted about costs and insurance and hard work; I responded with questions about the responsibility to citizens of one of the wealthiest nations in the world, with the research I had reviewed, with the concept of moral compass. At some point, my mask came off, not just the Clinton façade, but the mask of restraint I learned to wear around the ego-fragile co-habitants of my work environment. How’s that for jargon?
We steamed up the break room. An audience assembled. When we agreed to disagree, one on-looker deemed me the winner of the exchange. The crowd dispersed. The two of us remained. My opponent agreed I won the round. Then, and this is why I am writing this, he spoke.
“It’s not what you said, it was your delivery.”
How was I supposed to say it? With please and thank-you and a curtsy. With a flash of cleavage. With apology or passivity. His words suggested a certain demeanor would make challenging him more acceptable. He diminished his stature even more with the innuendo.
I will keep my eye on AOC. I will listen to what she has to say. I know the internet has lists of the “craziest” or “dumbest” things AOC has said. The time for womanspeak is now. I will listen and hope it will be heard.
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.
On turning 68 in 2019
My 68th birthday looms. It creeps towards me, tenacious, heat resistant like the ground cover in my shrubs. I tear up clumps of the succulent green with baby’s breath like flowers and throw it in the dirt. In a week, it is spreading, thriving, a lush carapace for soil turned to dust by the sun.
This year I am grateful I am upright, as I am every year. My gait deviates a bit. My right leg swings out to the side when I walk; the right foot wobbles before it hits the ground. That’s MS for you. If stopped by a cop, I refuse to try and walk in a straight line, because I’ll always look drunk. I’m prepared to refer him or her to the clinic, to the doctor, where I log intermittent moments of my journey and hope to have enough time left to create a few more.
I am grateful for a partner who gives me space for my obsessions, who loves me for who I am, who still holds my hand when we sit on the sofa together.
I am grateful for the fact that the moment I sit before a blank page and type just a few words, something awakens. My mind pinballs from the present to the past to the present to the future. I create sorceresses and serial killers and murder victims. I reencounter patients and students and lovers I’ve sequestered in that biological computer known as my brain. I read books and see what I’ve missed in my stories. I revise and think to myself “Who needs drugs when the mind is immersed in the magnificent process of creating?” I want to be TC Boyle and JC Oates and Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler and Wallace Stegner and Andy Warhol and Van Gogh all rolled into one.
I want to see my son perform on The Ellen Degeneres Show. His songs come up on my play list when I’m working out and my pace quickens. I can’t believe how talented he is.
Mine is a wonderful life.
Then reality abrades its noxious way into my consciousness and I mourn. I mourn for what I see as the erosion of all the progress women my age thought we made in the early 70’s.
I remember reading Our Bodies, Our Selves and began to see and understand my body as my own, divorced from the “body politic” and not distorted by “the Gaze.” I celebrated a sense of visibility and having a voice that was and would be heard. I chose a career with a “living wage.” I smugly thought, if I have children, they will be proud of what my generation accomplished for my gender. Foolishly I rested on my laurels thinking the fight was over, the battle, no the rights, had been won. Forever.
As 68 gets ready to bulldoze over 67, I mourn the current socio-political climate, which, like my ground cover, proliferates and spreads. What it spreads is not pretty or protective. It spreads ignorance, prejudice, and hate. I mourn the roll back of resources and funding that will guarantee women reproductive health and personal freedom. I mourn that money and connections allowed a sex trafficker a lighter punishment and enabled him to commit the same crime again, reaffirming that women and girls in this country are nothing more than cheap merchandise. I mourn that the top elected official in this country voiced his sense of entitlement when it comes to women’s bodies, a “man” who so misunderstands sexual assault that he deflects allegations of it with “She’s not my type.” I mourn that it took two daring sports figures to get people to face the injustices and inequities that plague our so called free and democratic society. I mourn the fact that I fear the physical environment in which my grand-children will live and grow.
My birthday wish: Let me do one thing that will make the world a little bit better.
A letter to the DNC and all potential Demeocratic presidential candidates
An opening platform of “Beat Trump” is not enough, Mr. Biden, and stoops to the pep rally antics of Mr. Trump, well illustrated by Ben Fountain in Beautiful Country Burn Again.
If you want my vote, regardless of your gender, faith, or sexual orientation, these are the problems I want addressed in your campaign:
- Clear distinction between pro-birth v. pro-life. It is not the physical act of bringing a child into the world that forces women to consider termination of pregnancy, it is the provision of food, health care, education, shelter, and emotional support. If a woman is a criminal for terminating a pregnancy, why isn’t a man criminalized for not taking responsibility for his off-spring. It takes two to conceive.
- In a wealthy, industrialized nation, health care is a necessity and a right. If this country is to maintain its place of leadership in the world, affordable, accessible healthcare and medications should be available for citizens. Conscience must come before capitalism and profits.
- A clear-cut plan for the humane management of immigration must be forthcoming, not in a few years, now.
- Proactive action must be taken to preserve the environment for future generations.
- Politics must maintain a modicum of civility and address issues rather than using name calling and obscure allegations to incite voters.
- Term limits must be considered so those who govern are in touch with the present, not languishing in the past’s quagmire of social mores and standards.
- Elected officials must be held accountable to the people who elected them.
Just a few thoughts for the day after my morning coffee.
Multiple Sclerosis-The Monster
My feet woke me up this morning, burning hotter than a pig on a spit. I knew not to expect blisters. The sheet billowed when I yanked it off with the flourish of a matador. MS. I have referred to it as “my MS.” I hate acronyms. They reduce the horrific to the mundane. MBC. Does that make Metastatic Breast Cancer any easier? Only for drug companies advertising treatment. COPD? Does that make it easier to breathe when you have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease? I have Multiple Sclerosis. It doesn’t deserve a nick name. If I refer to it as MS, you might think I am talking about a Masters degree. Although I have one of those, “my MS” refers to the disease which has been my master, as both a blessing and a curse, for forty years. I haven’t talked about it much. Call me a private person. But after joining a writers’ group on Facebook, I found out two things. The first? Nothing is off limits. The second? Talking about living with a monster may help someone else living with one, whether it is an abusive partner, a child in trouble, or Multiple Sclerosis. Be advised. This is not a forum for whining or self-pity. I worked until retirement, work-out six days a week, enjoy good eye sight, and seem to be a thinking human being. Many are not so lucky. That does not mean I haven’t faced the monster on a daily basis and trembled in its shadow. More to come.
The Second Amendment Blues
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.
In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.
Mine’s bigger than yours.
Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.
Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy. My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”
Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.
My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?
Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.
A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.
A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.
Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.
My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.
A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun. My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.
Today I have had enough.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.
I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.
My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.
I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.
Thank God I don’t own a gun.
An Interview with FloNi-2017
When did you realize you were meant to be a nurse? My first student experience was in a nursing home. The team leader confessed they had a patient who earned the title “Most Difficult” I chose her, thanks to my arrogance and innocence, because I thought I could reach her. Through her morning care she hollered and complained. When I didn’t rush her through her lunch, she began to talk about her life and the limited choices for a smart woman in the early 1900s. By the end of my clinical days, she called my name as I walked down the hall to leave. Sally B. didn’t just reach me; she touched my soul, and I still hear her haunting voice calling me to come back.
What do you think is the greatest part of being a nurse? Nurses bear the responsibility and privilege of entering the lives of patients and their families when they are in need and most vulnerable. The constant change in technology challenges, but it is learning to provide the best, personalized care in a corporate model that demands vigilance, commitment, and persistence. I remind myself of this every day.
How has the profession of nursing changed over the years? When I first started nursing, autonomy and clinical decision making advanced exponentially. To nursing’s detriment, litigation, the imposition of bureaucratically driven policies and procedures, and the layering of the health care team with yet another interface between the patient and the physician is undoing the autonomous growth bedside nurses enjoyed. Lack of autonomy will reduce bedside nurses to automatons.
You said you are changing careers. When you speak of nursing, your voice fills with awe. What has happened to make you want to leave?
It’s a symbolic, most basic illustration, but it depicts the root of why some nurses leave nursing. A group of nurses formed a committee, reviewed the literature, and revised a policy decreeing it was not harmful for nurses to wear nail polish as long as it was well maintained. The same nurses who celebrated this win refuse to shave, or don’t see the necessity of, shaving a male patient. Both things address personal hygiene. It’s just that simple.
Nurses now work in a world where initials in boxes on a paper taped to a patient’s door mean more than the documentation in the nurses’ notes detailing hour after hour when the nurse hasn’t left the patient’s bedside, not even for a bathroom break.
From an old feminist perspective, the clock is swinging backward. I worked through a time when MDs were held accountable for inappropriate work place touching and venting of anger at nurses. Â Because younger nurses don’t realize how older nurses fought for simple respect, they contribute to the devolution of professional boundaries.
Corporate health care mandates doing more with less. Decades ago we planned care before a patient arrived. In one instance, due to the emotionally complicated situation of one man, nurses volunteered to be primary caretakers throughout his hospital stay. The clergy and psych staff became involved. Everyone invested in the plan followed the man through his surgery, his stay in ICU, telemetry, and finally his discharge. When he returned, he told us we changed his life. A bitter, angry man was helped by a simple plan. How does insurance reimburse for that? How do staffing matrices account for that? Nursing organizations prattle on about “best practice.” Who defines that? The man whose life we changed, of course.
More often than not, I go home from my shift feeling I haven’t done enough. And thus, it’s time to go.
A Ghost of Christmas Past: Dec. 1973
The year I graduated from nursing school I knew very little about nursing except what to wear.
My white uniform, designed with a bib of crisp pleats across the bust, tented into an A-line skirt. The hem fell exactly to the middle of my knees. White stockings and utilitarian shoes worthy of a convent exemplified my look of a novitiate. Infection control and the influx of men into the profession eventually rendered the winged-white caps obsolete. I pulled my long blonde hair into a pony tail, stuffed it into a crocheted “snood’” and secured it with bobby-pins. For convenience I always stuck a few pens in my mound of hair, Geisha hair sticks by Bic. I never wasted time looking for a writing tool. My favorite offered three colors of ink, red, blue, and green, to accommodate each of the eight hour shifts in a day.
Three hospitals provided services to my small college town in the Midwest. A five bed surgical intensive care unit became my basic training camp. Monitoring EKGs and frequent vital sign checks were considered state of the art. On days when less than three patients required this vigilance, I functioned by myself in this new, specialized area of the hospital. I documented changes in EKGs, electrolytes, vital signs, and pain control, and established standards of care. I initiated calls rather than depending on a “head nurse” or supervisor to speak for me. Intensive care necessitated eliminating time delays and the middle man; I answered directly to doctors and the demand for accountability fell on and appealed to me.
Of course I worked my first Christmas on the job. Christmas 1973 gifted me with insight into my career choice and the ever-present threat to ICU patients known as death.
My patient looked like Alan Bates, the actor. Roguish, with curlicues of black hair slick with sweat and oil, the man reclined in a rickety framed gurney. He angled his elbows on the metal frame like a king holding court He strained the cloth restraints that secured his hands to the side rail. With each effort, his biceps bulged and trembled. Shaking his head side-to-side, he uttered incomprehensible sounds and marked his territory with a circle of spittle. My immaculate uniform meant nothing to a man wallowing in a reality fragmented by the effects of alcohol withdrawal and hypotension.
I fantasized about Alan Bates ever since the movie Women in Love, where I watched Mr. Bates and a young, though semi-portly Oliver Reed romp in the first nude male wrestling scene to appear in a mainstream film. The full frontal male anatomy fascinated me. How could I imagine in five years that career experience would reveal every variant of the mysterious penis and turn it into nothing more than a delivery conduit for the precious measure of renal perfusion, urine?
I nicknamed him The Professor. I can’t remember his real name. Today HIPPA would demand I protect it. He epitomized my ideal of an English professor complete with perfect, albeit, slurred diction and a penchant for whiskey. I imagined him fully functional, both cavalier and cerebral in a tweed sports coat with leather patches on the elbows. College girls flocked to his classes, his office, even his apartment. And I, fresh enough, inexperienced enough, thought like all novices with addiction, that a little love and attention could cure alcoholism and all the underlying problems that caused it. I’d say the right things, and The Professor would quit smoking, quit drinking, eat right, and publish a book dedicated to me. I also thought medicine could save him from the massive gastro-intestinal bleed channeling life from his body. In one day I learned what little power altruism, innocence and science wielded.
It was just he and I. The day nurse dashed away as soon as she finished report. Short and to the point: “ 34 year old white male. Bloody emesis with clots in his stool. Found unconscious at home by a neighbor. Two units of blood given in the ER. No family. Sinus tach on the monitor.”
There it was. The security of what I then believed was the pinnacle of technology. In just a few years to merely monitor the EKG would be comparable to using a squirt gun against a light saber.
“Dr. Reisman said there is nothing more to do.” Today it seems there is nothing we can’t do. There are no rules about when to stop.
I picked up my stethoscope to start my assessment and stopped a moment to shift gears. Looking around it disappointed me to see no one had decorated the unit for Christmas. Through an expansive fifth floor window, low hanging clouds rolled over the trees and houses. Smokey mist covered every building and obscured the lights and decorations heralding the season. Loneliness accompanied the focus required for my work.
I approached The Professor with caution. His gown gathered in folds across his abdomen and groin. The monitor electrodes glared white against a thicket of chest hair. Small halos surrounded each electrode where the hair had been shaved. A small slash of dried blood marked a path down his chin. He sat in a smear of maroon with a clot the size of a plum mashed against one rail of the gurney. His writhing agitation caused his blood pressure cuff to slip down his arm to the restraint. I could see his pulse on the monitor and count his respirations. I needed to check The Professor’s blood pressure.
There is nothing more gag-inducing than stool from someone bleeding in the gut. It blends the smell of fresh blood, rotting meat, and swamp gas.
When I started to examine The Professor, I didn’t know this. The odor surrounding him forced me to breathe through my mouth. I stepped closer and started a standard script. “I’m Cindi and I’m going to be your nurse today. I need to listen to your chest, heart, and abdomen.” I said abdomen because he was a professor. A whiff of his body odor reassured me I could have said “gut.” After holding my stethoscope between both hands to warm it, I placed the diaphragm on his chest. I heard the familiar squeaks and crackles of smoker.
“I need…I need…”
I heard his voice drone as the sound traveled through his chest and the diaphragm of the stethoscope, up the slick black tubing, and through the ear pieces into my head. I pulled back. “What is it that you need?” Pompous satisfaction. I was making progress with the man. He trusted me enough to ask for something.
“I need…” A blast of red erupted from his mouth and landed in an abstract design of spatter on my uniform. I looked at the chrome paper towel dispenser and saw nothing on my face, but from mid chest down I easily could have been mistaken for a gunshot victim or a Pollack. I washed and dried my forearms and returned to The Professor. Before AIDS and public awareness of the dangers of hepatitis, it never dawned on me to be afraid of exposure to body fluids.
The Professor’s head dropped against his shoulder. His heart beat twenty beats per minute faster to compensate for the loss of blood from his system thus maintaining his blood pressure. I sped up his IV fluids and paged Dr. Reisman.
When waiting for a physician to return a call, when it feels like all the responsibility is on you, time shows no mercy. My heart pulsed in my temples. Sound amplified. The Professor’s sonorous breathing seemed to roar through the unit.
The monitor warned of irregular heartbeats. Unable to hear a blood pressure, I palpated one with the systolic throb recognizable at 45. The phone rang. I reported the events of the past ten minutes and hoped some new medical development had evolved in that time.
Dr. Reisman was as new to his medical practice as I was to my nursing practice. When we worked with patients and each other, two pairs of fresh eyes explored changing professional roles, planning care with new knowledge and inspiration, reshaping old traditions. I represented a new breed of nurses with my four year degree. Just starting his practice, he seemed to approach me differently than the older, well-weathered MDs. Or perhaps he simply heard the uncertainty, the disbelief, and, yes, the desperation in my voice. “I’m on my way.”
The Professor rallied and resumed thrashing about the gurney. His heart rate remained high. A pallor circled his mouth. With a violent twist of his head, he resisted the green plastic prongs for supplemental oxygen. He repeated the move when I tried to wipe his mouth and wash the blood from his chin.
A small man with thick, pre-maturely silver tipped hair and an earnest demeanor, Dr. Reisman arrived. I noticed the five o’clock shadow of his beard. He noticed my uniform. “Did this just happen?”
I nodded.
“There really is nothing more we can do.” Dr. Reisman stroked his chin and walked over to The Professor.
“Can you hear me? You are really sick. At this point we can’t get you better. Is there anyone we can call? Is there anything I can do for you?” He rested his hand on The Professor’s forearm.
The Professor stared across the room and said nothing. Guttural sounds rumbled in the back of his throat. Watching a man’s demise, tethered to a bed in my ICU, gobsmacked me.
“Call me when something happens. I’ll be in the ER.”
I admired tailored slacks and polished shoes as Dr. Reisman stood at the elevator. In a time when patriarchal practice dominated medicine, Dr. Reisman showed me a glimmer of the collaborative practice of the future. That day I sensed something about the potential of my profession that would come to fruition many years, many patients, and many challenges later.
“Doc.” The Professor sputtered in a coarse whisper. “Doc, can I just have a cigarette?” His head lolled to one side. The monitor warned of disaster.
When I looked up at the small black screen, three to four beats of wide amorphous conduction, the kind that drop cardiac output and blood flow to the brain, interrupted the rapid, but regular white P-QRS pattern of tachycardia. The Professor lost consciousness. The irregular rhythm looked like a child’s drawing where a tiny hand zig-zagged a crayon across a piece of paper. More and more clusters of chaos appeared. Finally chaos reigned.
Without a regular heart rhythm, the heart failed to perfuse. Within minutes The Professor stopped breathing. A white line, as clear and sure as a jet stream, crossed the monitor screen. The monitor screamed its proclamation of death with a continuous high-pitched alarm.
What happened after The Professor died, I don’t remember. I knew the mandatory procedural rituals performed after a patient’s death. In 1973 plastic body bags didn’t exist. I assume I wrapped The Professor in a sheet. Today I sing Native American chants to patients as I prepare their bodies to be taken away. There was no singing for The Professor. I had much to learn about what was right and proper and comforting to me when working with the dead.
Nor do I remember what I did that Christmas night when I got home. Until I owned a house with a fireplace, I made one out of construction paper and corrugated cardboard painted like bricks. The felt Christmas stocking my mother made me hung by the faux-fireplace on a tiny nail. Mom decorated the stocking with symbolic cut-outs. Beads and sequins sparkled on a candle, a train, a ball, and other various mementos of childhood. There was no nursing cap; that identity had not entered my being when Mom created the stocking.
For many years, the memory of The Professor’s last words, the loneliness of his death, and my feeling of inadequacy stayed with me. I saw myself, like a candle in an infinity box, as a myriad of nurses expanding in many directions, burdened with the responsibility for another person’s life, alone to experience the loss of a man who, at first glance, seemed a person of looks and intelligence and potential, but who was simply a man I tried to help and failed.
I could have changed jobs, gone to work in the newborn nursery or a doctor’s office. I could have quit nursing altogether. The Professor would have no second chance, but I continued nursing in search of my mine.