Cynthia Stock

An amazing author for your soul!

A Slice of the Pie

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I retired from bedside nursing over five years ago. In that time, every medical journey with my body demonstrated to me how broken our health care system is. Medical specialization is one culprit in the fragmentation of care. When I go to my cardiologist, I am the heart with Sick Sinus Syndrome. When I go to my electrophysiologist, I am the dual chamber, MRI friendly, pacemaker. When I go to the dermatologist, I am skin. When I go to the joint specialist, I am the knee not wanting to have surgery, not the septuagenarian with MS who works out six days a week and walks funny. When I go to the MS doctor, nothing more need be said, except that I am blessed. For the most part, my disease is invisible. Maybe that is why it doesn’t come up often in a plan of care.

Every specialist gets a bit of me; no one cares for the “all of me,” I realized this when after working with the same Physical Therapist for several weeks, we discussed my Multiple Sclerosis, which suggested this wasn’t considered when the orthopod submitted orders to treat my bobbling knee.  The therapist didn’t know I had it.

Flash back twenty years and my diagnosis of pulmonary embolism. Although I saw a hematologist, the risk of clotting problems associated with autoimmune disease was never mentioned.

I have a dream for my health care providers. Once a year, I’d like a Zoom meeting, God forbid we could do it in situ, where each one helps put the pieces of the puzzle that is my body together and makes recommendations for my health maintenance. I would come with a list of questions about what the interface of body systems and health problems means for the coming year. I would come hoping I would be recognized in toto.

I See No Women Like Me on TV

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After surviving the scourge of cystic acne and seven surgeries for basal cell skin cancers on my face, I realized I don’t see women like me on television, that grand purveyor of what is stylish and acceptable. I see women portraying assassins who kill half a dozen men, are thrown against walls, break mirrors with their faces, marked only by a smudge or two of blood as badges of courage. I see talk show hosts with different hair styles every day, pristine cheeks, eyes lined and mascaraed, fashionable clothes, and manicured nails long enough to function as deadly weapons.

What I don’t see are facial scars, not invisible scars caused by rejection, bullying, lost love, not surgical scars in places that can be buried in layers of clothing. I am talking about a track in a cheek, on a nose, dividing a lip into asymmetrical halves, flaws of the flesh that detail the map of a life.

My scars began to carve their presence in young adulthood when stress, hormones, and maybe genetics, ravaged my face. I went to a dermatologist who lanced and drained and prescribed antibiotics. After a tumultuous episode of sobbing in his office, so loud and uncontrollable the doctor insisted the office assistant stay with me, I managed to get back to my dorm only to have to eat dinner with my friends with my freshly assaulted face on full display.

I felt the throbbing pain, not from needles, but from the humiliation of being on the cusp of adulthood and cursed by a disease that presented itself in such an obvious place, a place there was no way to hide. I wondered what I had done to deserve such punishment, because that is the way young people think.

 

Things settled down for a while. I accepted the uneven landscape my face and labeled it dimpled, like a water puddle in the street being textured by raindrops. I knew in reality my face emulated the moon.

I graduated from college, married, moved, and started my first job, all things my parents’ core values and signs of approval taught me I should accomplish if I wanted to be considered successful. My husband subsumed himself in TA responsibilities, chemistry experiments, and mastering the new tech language of the flourishing computer age, FORTRAN.

In the small, college town ICU where I worked, I nursed a man who died from burns caused by a fan belt when he fell on his tractor with the motor running. I stared at the girl, almost my age, brain dead from carbon monoxide inhalation when she and her boyfriend parked in a cornfield for privacy, left the motor running for warmth, and failed to notice the exhaust backing up into the car. I watched the drunk leap over his side rails, fly through the air, and land in the arms of a diminutive colon-rectal surgeon. My face broke out, each bump a monument to the tragedies and surprises life presented.

My co-workers, the people who watched the same horror show as I, became family. We routinely gathered at the mom-and-pop pancake house for breakfast. At night, we went to movies or drank and danced at the nearest bar, which happened to be a gay bar. It didn’t matter. We felt safe until grief from the losses we shared challenged professional distance and dissolved personal boundaries. Dancing became experiments in tongues and hips and breasts and buttocks in a place where no behavior incurred judgement. I wanted to experience as much as I could before I died, because death, sadness, loss, seemed as prevalent as an acrid cup of crappy hospital coffee. I began to explore the things that might bring me from numbness and oblivion to hyperacute being. My face rebelled. Tetracycline became as routine as a daily vitamin to calm my erupting face.

Like many health care professionals, I believed the rules of well-being didn’t apply to me. I told myself that caring for sick people provided a protective barrier against the havoc nature could impose on the body. I read pages of warnings about the side effects of Tetracycline. Photosensitivity I interpreted as intolerance of bright lights.

 

I forgot those warnings when, after years of taking the drug on and off, a friend and I took a summer road trip to Galveston. A move inspired by my divorce had landed me in Texas. We left Dallas on a whim. When we arrived in Galveston, all the motels were booked, so we spent the entire day on the beach, until my friend noticed my face.

“You face is as red as a stop sign. We’ve got to get you out of the sun.”

We paid a ridiculous amount to a scruffy stranger in exchange for his cheap, dilapidated beach front room. Faded pastel prints adorned the walls. The bed was made with sheets that looked like they hadn’t seen a washing machine. I made ice packs for my face.

I had learned the magic of ice therapy when I pulled an unexpectedly heavy turkey from the oven. The roasting pan slid and grazed my forearm as I maneuvered to keep the turkey, drippings and all, from hitting the floor. I watched the blush of the burn, my arm, embarrassed by the heat. I remembered learning in my anatomy class how heat caused the capillaries to dilate and fluid rushed to the site causing blisters. Ice prevented blisters. That time, my skin healed without a blister or a scar.

On the way home from Galveston, my friend and I stopped at a drug store. I alternated ice and the commercial poultice of the day. My face peeled and healed. I thought I’d invented a cheap, natural way to exfoliate and never dreamed damage from the abandoned caution of one week-end when I was twenty-eight would hibernate, only to haunt me as I aged.

In a small college town, I could ride my bike anywhere and logged one thousand miles in a year. When I moved to Dallas, my body lost its tone and stress dominated my mind. I decided to start running. I bought the cheapest pair of running shoes in case my flat feet would betray me and force me to find another form of exercise.

I discovered I loved to run, especially in the heat of the day. A slick coat of sweat made my body glisten around mile five. I memorized the contours of hills, which streets had the prettiest yards, which yards had weather worn wooden fences from which their dogs might give chase. I learned to avoid cruisers who’d slow their cars and offer me rides. Seven miles left me roasted, inside and out. When I got home, hot and content, I glugged a half a gallon of water to replace what the heat took from me.

I didn’t wear sunscreen, sun glasses, or a hat with a visor. I didn’t read about the damaging glare from the asphalt. My running became a habit as strong as nicotine. While I ran, I felt both peaceful and in total control.

One day I looked in the mirror, admiring my outrageously sun-bleached hair and the unexpected deep tan masking my usually fair skin. I saw a rough spot on my lip and scraped it with a finger nail. It pulled away leaving a perfect circle, as if I’d plucked a weed from the dirt all the way to the root. A minute bead of blood appeared. In a day the spot healed, but a dip no bigger than a pinhead remained. I made an appointment with my dermatologist, Dr. Cheek. I picked him because I liked irony.

Before the invention of the Mohs procedure, doctors cut by sight and touch. I trusted Dr. Cheek, a mild man who looked quizzical, not amused, when I asked if he’d ever received a STAT acne call. He numbed my lip, something no more painful than being given a local anesthetic by the dentist. I sat on the edge of the examination table. I sensed rather than felt the scraping begin. Time loses substance when a hand holding a sharp instrument pushes and rakes across the lip you no longer are sure is there, until the instrument hits a nerve and you shift with anxiety. “That hurt,” I said, “I felt that.”

“Not much more.”

The procedure ended not long after that. How long? I’m not sure. I left the office with a dime sized hole in my lip that made the worst cold sore seem like art. I learned basal cell tissue had a different texture compared to healthy tissue. When there was nothing left but healthy tissue, the excavation stopped. I suppose I was thankful the good Dr. Cheek hadn’t put a hole in my lip and that I had a few days off before returning to work in the high splash profession of ICU nursing. I suppose I went running the next day. I suppose I figured this would be the only time I’d have to endure such trauma.

Believers say “Make a plan and God laughs.”

What riotous glee must have echoed through Heaven.

 

Decades later, despite a solid marriage, a challenging job, and a new house, my plan unraveled. Had God been laughing all this time? It started with a small spot on my nose requiring a snip and a stitch. Then, a fleshy mole in the hairline of my left temple grew into a plump, textured monster taking over one side of my head. A general surgeon I worked with worked me into his schedule. I arrived for my appointment dressed in workout gear; I never dreamed of missing a workout.

Dr. Lewis numbed me and positioned me on my side. The paper covering the examination table rustled and sighed and reminded me it was my turn to be a patient. The local anesthetic given, Dr. Lewis put on his gloves and, using a scalpel, sliced away the creature claiming territory on my body. “You’re bleeding a bit, but I don’t think I’ll stitch it. I’ll bring the biopsy report over to the unit.”

Except for the wad of gauze on my head, I felt great. I knew eventually my hair would cover the scar. We shook hands. I hopped off the table and headed for the gym. Yes, I did go work out. It was a time before Dr. Google educated the general public about the community prevalence of Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus, a time before I realized I was mortal.

 

By the time a rough spot appeared on my nose, Dr. Lewis had succumbed to Alzheimer’s. A colleague and fellow runner referred me to a doctor who ran a clinic like a car assembly line. Rooms with plastic flags, each a different color, lined a long corridor. I arrived for my appointment to find half a dozen other people waiting to be prepped and cut. The doctor impressed me with his efficiency, his ability to put me at ease, and, ultimately, his dismissing my surgery as no big deal. He lied.

A young woman with on-the-job training, no formal education, explained she was going to numb my nose. Nothing had ever hurt like the needle piercing and accidentally penetrating the entire thickness of the side of my nose. The woman sucked air, paled, and hurried her exit with a “I’ll let the doctor know you’re ready.”

Fortunately, I asked my husband to drive me. He ushered me to the car with a mound of gauze on my nose. I couldn’t see over the dressing. I paced around the house avoiding the bathrooms and their tempting mirrors. I paced some more. I went into our bathroom and stared at the mirror. What horror hid beneath the bulge of the dressing? I peeled back the tape as gently as I could and lifted the gauze. I don’t know what sound I made. An “oooh” or an epithet. My husband rushed in afraid I had fainted. A dark hole the size of a quarter stared back at me. Emergency reconstruction took place a few days later.

A plastic surgeon I knew and trusted did the repair. I didn’t know it would be a two-step process. The first surgery created a flap on my nose. The doctor retooled the blood supply by operating along the natural crease of my cheek. It was hardly noticeable. But the flap bloomed like the bloated cap of an earthstar mushroom. The mirror became my enemy. I was scheduled to return to work at a job positioning me up close, face-to-face, with patients.

For two months, I wore a flesh-colored oval Duoderm patch over my nose, all day, every day. Not one patient ever mentioned it. No family members ever asked me about it.  People spending days in an ICU, dependent on strangers, hooked to noisy machines that alarmed, rather than reassured, rendered my trauma invisible to them.

The time came to debulk and revise the flap. After surgery, I could look in the mirror for the first time without wanting to die. My grief lingered, coupled with a twinge of shame. I longed for the face of the young woman I used to be. I was ashamed of my failure to take care of myself. And the doubter in me, the part of me who questioned the existence of a higher being, again wondered what I had done to deserve such torment.

My most recent biopsy has healed. I await another Mohs procedure. This time the diagnosis is more ominous, squamous cell. It is a frightening diagnosis, but what frightens me more is the new path that will be carved in my face. While I wait, I’ll workout, play with my cats, write, drink wine, and watch television, where I see no women like me.

 

The Warrior and the Mammogram

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. A clear-cut plan for the humane management of immigration must be forthcoming, not in a few years, now.
  4. Proactive action must be taken to preserve the environment for future generations.
  5. Politics must maintain a modicum of civility and address issues rather than using name calling and obscure allegations to incite voters.
  6. 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.
  7. 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

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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

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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.