Episode 29: Background Music While Sabine Leaves this World

NOTE:  All persons' names other than Sabine's have been changed to maintain their privacy.


Before you start "watching" this episode['s text cross the screen, delivering visual messages--hopefully], you must turn on your audio and listen to this version of Amy Winehouse's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"  NOT the one that is on most of the compilations; this one is in the soundtrack of The Diary of Bridget Jones, a totally arbitrary fact, since I heard it as the lead song on the European press of Lioness:  Hidden Treasures, while the U.S. press of that album has a different version I like much less.  This one is simpler, not so produced, which fit perfectly into the gentle but good vibe mood we wanted while listening to it over the holidays last year, while we sat vigil by Sabine's bedside.

Here's the correct version:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ludxpkyrab0.

Only by playing that version of Amy's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" as you "view" this episode might an ache rise in your chest similar to the one now in mine as I think about my last days with my dearest friend, mentor, and treasure--Sabine.  I've written about her before, so you may want to catch up on the story by going to earlier posts--Click on "Sabine" in my labels on the right-hand lower side of my first screen to access those.

Episode 28: A Sixties Childhood: Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Besotted Student

First grade teacher:  Mrs. Brown.

Pretty.  Big brown eyes and a beehive of rich brown hair.  Wore pretty clothes.  A lot younger than Mrs. Erwin, who'd taught kindergarten.

She was my first crush--oh, wait, that was Davy Jones.

Very little of that school year remains in the memory vault, but anyone who has had the demon anxiety stabbing its little fork into one's psyche as I so regularly did (until Effexor saved me--but that's another episode) will relate to the horror of this memory and the damage it must have inflicted on my already neurotic little six-year-old soul.

Mrs. Brown sat with the class during lunch, and each day a different student would be selected for the honor of sitting right beside her!  She always sat on the end, and I'm sure this was to relieve her of the duty of sitting between two students--but we didn't think like that then.  We were certain she was as happy to sit with us through lunch as we were with her.

On that day, I had been selected--at last, and to my immense joy--as the Chosen One. All morning I envisioned sitting next to Mrs. Brown and having the most wonderful conversation with her--or whatever six-year-olds want when sitting next to a beloved teacher.  My memory isn't quite that good, but I have to think I'd be trying to come up with stuff to say.

Of course, I could think of nothing to say.  Yes, even six-year-olds can be shy, and this memory tells me I'd already acquired that trait in spades by then.  But I was holding my own until . . .  I took a big bite of my apple and . . . .   Can you guess?

Episode 27: Mary Dell, MD (Medical Detective)

This episode promises to meander somewhat.

I've decided to give myself an MD after my name.  That's right, Mary Dell, MD.

NO!  Not Medical Doctor--believe it or not, this isn't about my ego, and I don't pretend to know a fraction of what physicians and other health professionals know.  I've been interested in a few very specific health conditions, since they have affected members of my family, and since I became a smorgasbord of chronic disease myself.  I don't want their jobs.  I don't like dealing with blood and guts.  I like research, on anything at all, really, but since these medical problems keep plaguing me and folks I know (like all of us), that's what I'm researching these days.  And, heck, I'm a bona fide medical librarian, so I know how to do it.

No, just call me Mary Dell, MD, for Medical Detective. And this is the Mary Dell Mystery Disease show.  MD MD, MD--

Will that get me hired to consult for House?  Ha.

Episode 26: Down the Rabbit Hole Yet Again aka Health Care Due Diligence

Health care due diligence.

Has a nice ring to it.

We patients, the so-called "consumers" of health care, expect due diligence when we entrust our bodies and minds to that system.

But that's not what the term refers to.  No, "due diligence" is an accounting term, a requirement to investigate a potential investment before recommending it to clients.  If you are an investment banker, that is.  And you know how concerned they have been about our welfare over the past, say, oh, twenty years. These shills for the megarich are selling our flesh on the open market, while the megarich buy personal physicians and specialists who come to their homes or live there, sort of like modern-day Rasputins.

And the rest of us are relegated to a system built on corruption. I don't mean the health professionals and researchers and all of those who, with integrity, are working to make lives better for their fellow human beings.

I'm talking about the ones who are exercising their due diligence.  You know, them.

"'The best sort of due diligence process begins with a game plan [or strategy], and it proceeds along that game plan, only changing as dynamics of the due diligence changes or as [new issues] are discovered,' says Mr. Van Demark," one of the principals in the investment firm quoted in an article online (URL below).

I'm glad to know our physical and mental anguish is bandied about on the market as a game. Gives me extreme confidence in the system, let me tell you.

Episode 25: Down the Rabbit Hole and Suffocating

Air.

The breath of life.

We are immersed in its invisible currents, and it travels throughout our bodies to bring life to each cell, our lungs infusing our blood with that precious O, and our blood cells in organs along the route suck it up, this life-giving element without which they, and we, will die.

Air.

How easy it is to take for granted, to forget about its ubiquitous and necessary presence in each moment we know ourselves to exist.

Thanks so much to Douglas A. Sirois for permission to use this beautiful image, one that captures my feeling about the sacredness of air, especially given my increasing lack of the element in which we are immersed and dead without! The artist has many spiritual and fantasy illustrations I love!
www.dougsirois.com
douglas.sirois@verizon.net
http://dsiroisillustration.blogspot.com/
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4223178/

So.  Why is it that my cells are not getting enough air?  That is the medical question of the day, the hour, the year. In fact, dyspnea—shortness of breath—began noticeably for me over Christmas and New Year’s while traveling to Europe and Switzerland. Actually, it was more like utter exhaustion than shortness of breath—the shortness of breath came because I was trying to get that precious air to the muscles that threatened to give out beneath me.

Air didn’t seem so invisible to me that day.  Of course, I couldn’t see it, but I could visualize its little superhero blobs traveling newly oxygenated from my lungs through the arteries, greeted with joy and celebration by the thirsty cells waiting in muscle and tendon and bone and organ, the parts of us that need that bloody, airy drink to keep going.   

Episode 24: Down the Rabbit Hole aka the U.S. Health Care System

Should you find yourself on the cusp of death in these United States, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Okay, so we’re all afraid on the cusp of death, so how about this:  Should you find yourself sick for any reason in these United States, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

I live close to the finest medical institutions on this planet, and I have arguably the best insurance company covering my care, so my care should be top-notch and should not end up bankrupting me, right?

Well, it was a different insurance company covering me when I did have to go bankrupt due to losing my job because I was ill—yes, I know that’s illegal, but you just try to fight it and see how useful that in—in my case, I gave up after one of three appeals because I was so darned sick, so exhausted, and my mind and abilities to do paperwork were not up to the task, and so I let it go.

Let it go.

Let everything go.

Because when you’re sick in the United States today, that’s likely what you’ll have to do.

The issues abound, and I intend to take each one on in future episodes, but for today I’ll focus on what I believe to be the underlying problem, the fundamental issue escalating costs and reducing coverage.

Episode 23: A Sabine Christmas

I'm coming to this topic raw, unpolished.  Uncertain of what I want to say or even how to begin to say it.  I imagine I will massage this episode innumerable times in the future, and I'm not sure I'll get very far with this very first attempt.

I want to write about it, to connect with the persons and places and emotions I connected with then, but the task is daunting on so many levels, the most daunting being the pain I feel when I think of her, lying there in the hospice bed, sleeping most of the time, thankfully--she wasn't in a lot of pain most days, but exceptions certainly came, and even if medication kept the physical pain at bay the psychic pain was palpable to us all.

We tried to do what she'd wanted.

Sabine knew she was dying, and she and I had shared emails in which we talked about what we'd want in our last days.  I'd visited her a year ago in Albania, and I was dumbfounded that she had lived another year after her surgeon told her they'd decided her cancer was inoperable--in other words, it had won.  The only way to defy Sabine's determination to live was to be relentless and brutal, and her cancer was both--though for the longest time she'd say she had cancer, but cancer didn't have her.