Blog #4 Working the Scene

Diabetes is a slow persistent killer.  It took my grandfather from us one piece at a time.  I was in elementary school when he lost his first leg to gangrene.  The blood wasn't circulating in his foot and leg properly anymore.  The diseased tissues were slowly dying.  To save his life he would have to lose his leg.  The surgeon cut off my grandfather’s leg just below the knee.  He sawed through skin, muscle, tendons and ligaments to prune away the dying tissue like my dad pruned the weeping willow in the backyard.  The one with the tire swing.

My grandfather comes to visit us after the amputation.  Scared and excited, I want to see what his artificial leg will look like and how the stump of his leg will look.  I picture flesh torn apart like a raw chicken being prepared for dinner.    

Grandpa Ed sits in my dad’s lazy-boy chair in our small living room and my little sister, Sarah, and I wiggle as we sit on the floor at his feet.  He looks almost normal sitting there with his brown cotton pants covering the artificial leg.  His real foot rests flat on the floor, but the artificial foot angles up unnaturally.  His pants are rolled up slightly revealing the sagging sock on his artificial leg.  Grinning, he pulls his pant leg up and reveals his new leg.  The fake leg is molded in the shape of an actual leg, peachy pink like the piglets at the County Fair.  The leg is smooth, but not hairless.  He’d drawn black hairs all over it with marker. 

Sarah and I cover his leg with stickers and he jokes about letting us tattoo him.  He shows us how he takes his new leg off and puts it back on. The leg is incredibly heavy.  The actual stump remains a mystery.  It’s covered in athletic bandages and a sleeve of some spongy material that provides a cushion between his stump and the leg. 

He loses his second leg a couple years later.  We visit my grandparents in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota that Christmas.  He is still recovering from the surgery and stretches out on the couch with his latest stump propped up.  I plop down in the space his leg used to fill and he swings the stump over as if his phantom leg were in my way.  His artificial legs no longer look anything like legs.  They’re metal poles with toe-less feet to fill his shoes.  They’re much lighter.  I miss that first leg, but it isn't there anymore, instead it hangs as a conversation piece in the Buffalo Gap bar.  I hope it’s still covered in marker.

Blog #3 Don't Tell it on the Mountain; Show it Instead

I love books.  As a child I dreamed of having a library of my own.  A few years ago we hired a contractor to add a room to our house.  It is a small office with floor to ceiling bookcases along two walls.  It's my favorite room in the house.  The shelves are filled with books and books are beginning to spill over into stacks on the floor.  I have piles of books in my bedroom and next to my favorite chair in the family room.  There are books everywhere.  Each book is a memory, a reminder of a class or a particular time in my life.

There are two books that I've never really considered mine.  I've never put them on a shelf.  I've never reread them.  I feel guilty even looking at them.



My friend, Alka, and I stuff my huge backpack into her tiny car and drive from Hanover to Hamlin.  Hamlin is the setting of the Pied Piper.  It is a picturesque German village and Alka's parents' house is like nothing I've ever seen before.  It's old.  White stucco walls support a wooden shake roof.  It's a large L shape with one wing for her parents and one wing for her grandparents.  Her family has lived here for generations.  The longer side of the L also includes a barn.  There are smaller outbuildings too.  The rooms are small with low ceilings.  The woodwork is beautiful and the furnishings are warm if a bit outdated.  The kitchen is cozy with a well worn family table in the corner.  In the small adjacent room they use as a pantry her mother has a machine for slicing meat for sandwiches.  It looks like something you'd only see in a butcher shop.  Alka's mother makes pizza in honor of having an American guest.  The crust is thick, there's no sauce, and one of the toppings is potatoes.  I can't stop smiling.  I appreciate her effort more than I can express.

Alka and I stay for a few days.  Her mother takes us shopping in the village and her father takes us to visit their weekend house.  It's only 20 minutes away.  Her older brother ignores us.  Her grandparents speak no English, but smile and hug me frequently.

After Hamlin, I was heading to visit another friend.  I'd packed as lightly as possible for the  almost two months I'd spend in Europe since much of my trip would be spent backpacking and camping.  I didn't bring any books.

Alka shares my love of books.  She offers to loan me something to read while I travel, but of course most of her books are in German.  There is a sagging bookshelf in an upstairs hallway.  She pulls out two books from an English class she'd taken in high school, "The Lord of the Flies" and "The Wave." Not my usual fare, but English at least.  "The Wave" is a small red text with a study guide. It includes tips for reading in English without using a dictionary.  According to the prologue, it is used to teach students about fascism.  Her copy of "The Lord of the Flies" has a white background with a black and white pig bleeding red from one eye and out both sides of its mouth.  It looks like the head is on a stake.  These don't look like anything I read in high school.  She hugs them to her chest and tells me how much she'd loved the class and how much these books mean to her.  I take them and promise to mail them back to her before I leave Europe.



I didn't keep that promise.  When I arrived back in the States and unpacked the books, I set them aside with every intention of mailing them to her.  I sent her a thank you note.  I sent her pictures.  I kept the books.  For sixteen years I've told myself I would send them to her, tell her how they filled the hours I spent alone in another friend's apartment in former East Germany, apologize, lie and tell her I'd misplaced them, use it as an opportunity to reconnect, catch up.  I recently added the books to a stack on the floor in the office.  They will eventually make it onto a shelf.  Maybe I'll even reread them.

Blog #2: My First MRI

My neurologist reminds me of Einstein.  He has crazy curly hair.  He makes geeky attempts to calm me with magic tricks and his eyes light up when he starts talking about the diseases that have to be ruled out in order to get to a diagnosis.  He looks at me like I’m a puzzle to be solved.

The first MRI he ordered took place at a clinic.  Subsequent MRIs would be at the hospital, but this first test was in the clinic nearby, kind of like a warm-up.  The tech who greeted me ran through a list of questions I could tell he’d asked a thousand times before.

Tech: “Are you on any medication?”

Me: “I took a Valium about an hour ago.”
Tech: “How are you feeling?”
Me: “Pretty relaxed.” I slurred.
Tech: “Any metal?”
Me: “No.”
Tech: “No underwire in your bra? No zippers, no snaps, no metal jewelry?”
Me: “No metal.”

He led me into the MRI room.  The machine didn’t look as scary as I’d imagined. It was just a big white tube with a platform in the center for the patient to lie on.  I’ve never liked small spaces and I could feel the sweat running down my sides.  I took off my shoes.  The floor was freezing.  I gave the tech my glasses and lay down on the platform.  The tech slid the pillow under my knees and covered me with a blanket.  Lying still for so long would be difficult, he warned, but without my knees up, it would be painful. 

“The machine can get pretty warm, so let me know if you want the blanket off.”  He said as he guided my head into the right spot on the head rest.  A cage-like structure was lowered over my face and strapped down.  Once the straps were in place, I couldn’t move my head at all.  The cage-like structure over my face included an angled mirror. The tech explained that the mirror was angled in such a way that I would be able to see out the end of the machine.  Without my glasses I could barely see two inches in front of my face much less out the machine.  I planned to keep my eyes closed.

He handed me headphones to block out the noise of the machine and to allow him to communicate with me.  He asked which radio station I’d like to listen to. “Just something soothing.” I said.  In the future my answer would be NPR which forces me to really listen and generally allows me to keep my mind from racing. 

He pressed the button to slide me in to the machine.  I squeezed my eyes closed and took a deep breath.  The tube is big enough that I fit inside, but my shoulders were squeezed together and I felt the sides of the tube hugging my whole body.  The patient must hold completely still and the tube is small enough to make moving pretty impossible. 

It is loud inside the MRI and it shakes in a way that reminds me of a washing machine spin cycle.  I listened to the music in the headphones.  The tech’s voice would break in every few minutes to give me instructions.  His constant interruptions included things like “Don’t move your head at all; don’t even swallow, for the next two minutes.”  As soon as he said that of course ALL I wanted was to swallow.  There were even a few minutes when I wasn’t supposed to blink.   

I wanted to know how tight the tube really was.  I opened my eyes once for about two seconds.  The smooth white tube was only inches from my face.  I didn’t open my eyes again.  I didn’t want to think about how little space I had.

I can’t remember if that first MRI lasted 45 minutes or an hour.  Subsequent MRIs, and there would be many, would last an hour and a half or so.  Halfway through I was slid out of the machine and I got to stand up for a moment while the tech adjusted the machine.  I didn’t have my glasses, so I really don’t know what he did to the machine, but soon enough I was back on the platform.  I felt lightheaded and dizzy after twenty or thirty minutes of not moving. 

It was time for the contrast dye.  In an MRI the pictures are taken and then the patient is given contrast dye and the pictures are all taken again.  My veins are always hard to find and it took the tech three tries to get the needle in. Once he found a vein, he pushed the plunger in slowly while watching my face for a reaction.  I tasted metal which apparently is a normal reaction.  As long as I didn’t get nauseated the tech seemed satisfied.  Then I was moved back into the machine for what felt like another eternity.

 

 

The internal conflict for me was the experience of being just another patient to the tech.  What was routine for him was terrifying for me.  My doctor had prescribed the Valium to help me deal with any claustrophobia, but really I think it just helped me be compliant.  You want to give me a shot that could cause kidney cancer later on?  Sure, knock yourself out.  I’ll even lie really still and not make a sound as you stab me three times.  Ultimately my neurologist did come up with a diagnosis, but it took months and lots of tests.  The first MRI was the moment I began to understand how it was going to be to navigate the machine of modern medicine as I learned to deal with chronic illness.