June 4.23: Coping, but barely

Warning: I am going to talk about my medical history. The reason: it’s HHT Awareness Month, and I’ve been negligent about it the last few years.

The alarms rang for me maybe fifteen years ago in California when I saw all the blood in my mouth.  My dentist said he saw no reason for it, but he should have: telangiectasias in the mouth are easily seen. He didn’t know, so dismissed it.

Fast forward to 2012 in Indiana. My doctor didn’t know either but did not dismiss it; she sent me to an otolaryngologist, who diagnosed HHT. I learned HHT was likely the reason I hemorrhaged after I had my tonsils out when I was little. Seriously?

Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia is a genetic blood vessel disorder. I got it from Dad. We never knew that all his nosebleeds — and mine — were a symptom of this thing.

HHT causes malformed blood vessels, small and large, which rupture. If nosebleeds are caused by HHT, they are not “just nosebleeds.” Internal bleeding, anemia, other complications, some life-threatening, are possible.

Many foods and medicines have blood-thinning effects, not great if you have HHT. For me, tuna, grapes, cranberries, walnuts, for instance, mean extra kleenex at the ready.  Melatonin? No way. NSAIDs? Never.

We knew Dad had ischemic bleeds in his brain, and apparently they are associated with vascular dementia. But I’ve come to wonder if his long history of blood thinners caused hemorrhagic bleeds in his brain also, ganging up on him and contributing to his dementia. Like father, like daughter?

Even doctors and dentists are not aware of HHT. Now, dear reader, you are. I’ve done my small part.

 

 

May 21.23: Thursday Doors Writing Challenge #3

It was a lovely August day, and the house was open. Through the kitchen window, I could hear the voices outside where Dad was talking to a neighbor. Dad was 83, but he sounded 20, self-assured and energetic in his conversation. No fumbling for words or any other signs that he was making it up as he went along.

Then he came in and asked me where the bathroom was. He’d lived in that house for over 50 years.

The Black Thing filled the doorway on his way to the bathroom; Dad walked through it. It was always in a doorway, a wanton living sentient void, to remind me there was no way out.  There was no food that didn’t taste like the blackness, no sunshine that wasn’t tainted by it, no voice that wasn’t hollowed by it. Its very silence was discordant.

I made dinner earlier to get food in dad before the Black Thing took him. It curled Dad over his dinner plate, forced him to strip his bed and stuff the pillows in his desk, forced him to dig tablecloths out of the old buffet and arrange them, bedlike, on the dining room floor, forced him to walk and walk and walk and walk. Night after night after night.

It covered Dad’s eyes with nightmares so Dad wouldn’t know where he was, wouldn’t know me, wouldn’t know himself. Walking, walking, driven by the Black Thing. Dad’s face wore the dying. Walking, walking, frail, frightened, angry.

When the anguished nights gave way to exhausted day, the Black Thing resumed its vigil in doorways. Like a bat to a cave. Goading me. Dad knew nothing of the nights, of the faceless thing that made even the humanity of tears impossible.

 

Submitted to Dan Antion’s

Thursday Doors Writing Challenge

with thanks to him for hosting,

and with thanks to Teagan R. Geneviene for the photo.

November 29.22: Coping, but barely

January 1983 was a low point in my life. I turned 40 and was starting over. I took a deep breath, went back to grad school, got an assistantship, and was assigned a cubicle.

My cubicle mate had different hours and we started leaving notes for each other. Give an English major a scrap of lined paper and stand back. Thus began our friendship.

A few years later, she developed a brain tumor which was initially misdiagnosed. It was a terrible fight she fought, but she survived. Not only that, but she earned her PhD at the same time.

That was Sandy. Sandra Littleton Uetz.

Almost thirty years later came the second tumor. She fought again but this time it was different.

I have lost a dear friend.

I don’t think I’m the only one who wonders.  When, at some low point in life, we find ourselves sharing a desk with a stranger who becomes a dear friend, what is that? Do we call it the grace of God, the luck of the Irish, random chance, some cosmic plan, serendipity?

And when the dear friend is at her low point, and we can’t do anything, what do we call it?

She had great teaching ideas, baked a mean cherry pie, was seriously conversant with Pogo and Krazy Kat and Mark Twain, collected buttons and handkerchiefs, loved books, the St. Louis Cardinals, cats, little dogs, birds, and, most deeply, her family. She was a woman of faith and fear — to live with the possibility of recurring tumors is to be just that.

One December Sandy and I drove to Valparaiso, where the square around the old courthouse had been developed into little shops. Christmas carols — REAL Christmas carols — were piped outside. We wallowed in happy nostalgia. It was one of our best hobnobbings. I promise to remember it.

One of her favorite poems, and perhaps her most favorite, is this, by Robert Frost:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

 

May the angels lead you, Sandy.

 

 

September 3.22: Coping, but barely

Harvest looms,

maple tips blush,

September’s percussion

comes in a rush.

Wachoo, snuffle, snort!

rings out through the land;

kleenex is crammed

in pocket and hand.

With sinuses gurgling,

persistent nose splash,

“Have a nice day”

is abject balderdash.

That hackneyed nice day

is pie in the sky

when the red of hot peppers

emblazons the eye.

Itching and wheezing

and scratchy of throat,

sufferers glare

when others emote

how lovely the day,

how pure the sky’s bluing;

they’d rail and berate,

but they’re busy wachooing.

 

 

April 14.21: Coping

I hate the isolation,

the sameness of the days,

the clouds of obfuscation

that politicians raise.

I hate the guns and beatings,

our bloody violent spate,

the toxic finger-pointing —

in sum, I hate the hate.

My scowl has been perfected,

my grumpiness assured,

my energy and spirit

effectively tonsured.

That is why the pansy

is at my closed front door,

hermetically sealed

against the global gore.

Such little flower that nods

congenial purple hope

can compensate for certain

resident misanthrope.

So if there’s a cheery face

as my homey welcome sign,

you know that it’s the pansy’s;

it most surely isn’t mine.

 

 

April 7.21: Coping

Until the next pandemic

we’ll pack our masks away;

I’ve no idea when,

but it will be some day.

They’ll go into the drawer

inscribed The Fibber McGee,

where souvenirs and remnants

await next century.

When comes that barefaced day

we hug with glad impunity,

when everyone is safe

with ’round-the globe immunity,

I think that I might feel

a twinge of slight regret

and miss that unloved sign

of one-for-all mindset.

I’ll miss the muffled greeting of

“Hey, I like your mask!”

acclaimed by passerby

I didn’t even ask.

And then I must return

to pre-pandemic place

where no one ever hails me

with “Hey, I like your face!”

 

 

 

February 28.21: Coping

Sameness.

Lines that dwindle

in a finite distance

but return, yawning,

retreat again,

pulling walls with them.

The boomerang of the hour

just spent,

but back again,

to be lived again.

The thread unraveling,

longer each day,

hapless,

dragged through life’s leavings.

Eyes numb,

ears empty but for sounds of

the breathing self,

chewing,

the scraping of a plate.

World goal:

to live without touching.

We are safe from COVID —

hooray.

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

December 1.20: Coping

Zinnia: thoughts of absent friends

 

Once upon a long-ago 1968, two life paths — mine and Libby’s — crossed in the highly combustible, hilarious, hormone-laden world of a junior/senior high school. She taught music and I was the new English teacher.

We met in the teachers’ workroom in a haze of mimeograph fumes, and quickly established our mutual love of music.  I was enlisted on the spot as official accompanist for her junior-high musical extravaganzas. I do not forget the moment the curtain went up for the ballroom scene in “Die Fledermaus,” with its aluminum foil chandeliers, and the audience exploded into spontaneous applause.

Or when the 8th-grade Josephine ad libbed her lines to the 7th-grade Ralph Rackstraw in “Pinafore” rehearsal.

Or the shivering hours in Libby’s basement as she sewed the angel costumes for “Hansel und Gretel.” Her childhood on a North Dakota farm made her impervious to cold and eventually she kept a blanket just for me because she grew tired of hearing my teeth chatter.

Libby and I had the best time in those bachelor days even though she could never convert me to gin or cats. I held to a firm belief in scotch and catlessness.  But, beyond bachelorhood, many were the years of friendship, many the pastries, many the morning coffees, many the long talks.

I would say now that I am dead to Libby but the fact is that for her today I never lived. She is far into dementia. She was lovely, a world traveler, opera buff, master gardener, idealist, a tolerant, inquisitive, lifelong learner, protective of all life. Cat addict.

She still is all those things; she just doesn’t know it.

I salute her today, her 93rd birthday. I will know for both of us.

 

November 3.20: Coping

Beset by inane logorrhea,

I turn to time-honored idea:

when the world goes askew,

make you some goo,

the original holistic panacea.

 

Here we are, dear reader, in this country, in desperate need of goo. “From sea to shining sea” used to refer to the beauty of the land; now it refers to angst, despair, fear, rage, frustration, isolation, loneliness, and profound exhaustion. And it is likely true that wherever you live it is the same. You might not have an election to deal with, but you likely have illness and death and uncertainty and loneliness stalking you. I offer you this goo by way of saying I wish I could make things better for all of us.

 

 

August 6.20: Coping

I knew it had to happen,

either soon or late,

inevitable, ordained

by calculating Fate.

A sign of our fraught times —

do you really have to ask? —

Nasal indigestion!

I sneezed into my mask!