Happy Passover! Happy Easter!

               Adrienne Rich's passing this week signals the fading of an era of lesbian brilliance and creativity, which she and Audre Lorde led.  I remembering carrying treasured copies of Diving into the Wreck, Twenty-one Love Poems, and The Dream of a Common Language in my back pack carefully wrapped in a scarf or in a bag so as not to crinkle the corners.  I read my favorites over and over, the magic aphrodisiac of her language rolling off my tongue:  "We are, I am, you are /by cowardice or courage /the one who find our way /back to this scene /carrying a knife, a camera /a book of myths / in which/ our names do not appear."  I won't quote the floating love poem here, but this third of the Twenty-One Love Poems brings tears to my eyes: 

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time 
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young. 
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty, 
my limbs streaming with a purer joy? . . . 
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever. 
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits. 
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, 
and somehow, each of us will help the other life, 
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.  

            This week Doris and I took a vacation away from Duke Medicine and drove two hours south to IKEA in Charlotte.  We reveled like runaways to be on the open road with the country side of blossoming trees whooshing past.   

Doris the Choreographer

Doris the Builder

            If Doris had rubbed a magic lamp for a tiny wish, this would have been it.  We did need more lights and stools.  Mostly we needed to get out of our boxed in daily grind.  I believe that a day away from intensive exercise was healing spiritually.  We ate turkey and melted provolone on grilled panini in the bright IKEA Cafe, and, in addition to three lamps and two stools, Doris selected stuffed toys--broccoli and carrot--for her great niece.   

            Back home for the next day, Doris was at her buzzing constructive best putting all the pieces together.  A wooden stool she'd just constructed graced the coffee table for half a day as an objet d'art.  I thought that the two white lamps looked like Pixar figures about to break into song and dance with Doris as choreographer.

            On every drive out of our forest we continue to enjoy the changing color palate.  Doris reminded me that I haven't been getting acupuncture--healing that calmed and centered me in NM and FL.  Here in Durham I've found Fang Cai at Oriental Health Solutions.  After Doris changed my oxygen tanks, which run out fast at the rate I'm using it, she snapped a picture of Fang.

Fang treating me at Oriental Health Solutions

Waiting for Transplant

Transplanting tulips or irises feels bright springy earthy.  Transplanting vital organs feels dark and mysterious.  Vital.  Organs.

            Sharing my travels on this dark mysterious journey sometimes seems excessive, but I'm encouraged to write this by believing that some want to share my journey--some of the not-too-gruesome details.  Some have asked when.  Nobody knows.   

            Zeliha, my transplant team nurse, whom I've never met face to  face, has called with team orders  for me to stop taking Plavix.  When I've been off that blood thinner for a week (keeping my ten-month old coronary artery stent open) I can be "listed."

            Nevertheless, they continue retesting me.  Last Thursday I had to prove I could maintain same speed on my six-minute walk test that I had three weeks earlier.  At 8:30 am on Thursday, April 12, I meet with another thoracic surgeon and have more tests.

            "Listing" means being on an official national list of patients eligible for the organ needed.  The greater the need the higher you are on the list.  In order to be called for a transplant, you must be a fit with the donated organ in terms of size and compatibility of blood type.  Duke has a good record of short time (14-19 days average) from listing to the call.  Once I'm listed I must be glued to my cell phone. 

            Please send prayers and peace to the generous person who agreed to donate their organs upon death and to the family who make the decision in the midst of their grief.  

            When a donor organ that fits me becomes available, someone from Duke calls me to come to the hospital in no less than two hours.  Before then, a recovery team has been harvesting all usable organs for several hours.  This must be marvelously gratifying work--to bring out of someone's death several new lives for people who would die without those Vital Organs.  

            At Duke the transplant surgeon examines the lung thoroughly while I'm prepared for surgery (chest x-ray, blood tests, more anti-rejection drugs by IV).  The surgeon may not accept the lung, as happened to two people in my group two weeks ago.  They were sent home disappointed but hopeful of receiving another lung soon.  Both of those people have since received new lungs from one donor.

            Surgery takes about 5-9 hours.  We're told that patients have no memory of  anything the first 12-24 hours after surgery, but your family make view you in ICU.  

            Waking up from surgery, I may have a nose tube draining stomach content, chest tubes draining my lungs, other tubes draining other orifices, and a large IV catheter in my neck monitoring heart function.  I may have a breathing tube in my mouth or nose and thus be unable to speak.  I may be fed through the in the nose for days or weeks.

            When I've reached an acceptable recovery stage after surgery,  I'll be taken from ICU to a step-up room where the nurses will begin to get me out of bed standing and walking as soon as possible.  Average stay in hospital after surgery is about two weeks depending on complications.  Many get released but return when new complications arise.  Almost everyone can expect some rejection of the alien organ.

            You can contact Doris: 505 463 1679 or dorburk@hotmail.com.    

Greening of Carolina Hills

           Belated Equinox blessings.  For most of March, Doris and I have been dazzled with early spring bursting alive like a symphony of greens as we drive the swooping hills so reminiscent of the Ozarks.  First the brilliant yellow forsythia rush at me with memories of walking a mile to St Jerome  School in Rogers Park in April 1940s with sudden surprising hope. 

            Before that yellow weaves into green here in the Carolina hills red bud branches appear with their mauve delicacy deep in the forest.  These give way to big waxy white magnolias dipped in ruby and pear trees as white as communion dresses.  For a week now fresh dogwoods and pink flowering trees I can't identify dot the roads.

            Every chance we get we take drives in different directions.  Last Sunday we discovered UNC-Chapel Hill campus.  Yesterday we spent a couple of hours inside a Verizon store getting me a Droid with keyboard and internet access. I'm determined to figure out how to access email from my new larger heavier multi-task phone.

            If I'd had the transplant in March and if spring hadn't come early, I'd have missed all this luscious color and palate of greens.  Today I celebrate ten months since my heart attack when I'd always thought I'd pass a safe threshold with my heart healed enough to come off Plavix, the blood-thinning drug that's making my skin so fragile for bruises, so they can do surgery.   

            Waiting requires patience I've never really had.  Last week waiting to see the doctor in clinic took an hour in the outer waiting room and another two hours sitting on the uncomfortable metal chairs in the examining room.  If we'd known how long we'd wait, one of us could have stretched out on the examining table and taken a nap.  I took pulmonary function tests at 8 am, and we left the clinic about 12:30.  By then we were ravenous.  They want to do a few more tests.  I'm trying to be grateful for their caution.

            I continue my daily three hours at Duke Center for Living in order to keep up my muscular and aerobic strength in this Olympic-style prep for transplant.  Never have I pushed so hard.  

            One rare day the therapist leading the floor exercises started a brief meditation.  "Relax and deepen your breathing," she droned in that come into alpha state voice.  "Go to a place that makes you feel happy." 

            The old guy on the mat next to me growled faintly, "Hardee's."

            His eyes popped open as he rolled in my direction. "Did I say anything?" 

            "Hardee's," I growled faintly.

            "Oh no," he rolled back on his mat.  I don't even remember who he is, but I've been pondering Hardee's as a happy place ever since. 

            Please send healing calming energy to me and all who need it now.  I'm eager to cross the bridge into my new life so that I can give back to communities here by doing what I love--teaching, reviewing plays, writing my memoirs, performing, and joining in political action.  I'm also eager to be walking and breathing fresh air without needing oxygen, driving places on my own, getting my own groceries, and doing my fair share of everyday tasks.

Doris & RK on new/used recliner

Doris arrived eleven days ago . . .

. . . after rolling along a well-worn groove across New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma and on into Springfield, MO, where she spent two nights with our old friends Tim and Terry.  She then drove to St Louis to see family.  A week ago Wednesday Terry routed Doris on alternate highways to avoid dark skies and funnel clouds which hop-skipped across her planned path.  Her silver Honda CRV, packed with our desktop computer, 22 inch TV, folding bookcase, folding table, a case of wine, clothes for all seasons, and whatever we need for six months chugged across Missouri before cutting across short corners of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia, and rolling into North Carolina. 

When she knocked on my door just after dark, I melted on the doorstep seeing her standing there in my forest after nine months of living with most of North America between us.  North Carolina reminds us of the Ozarks, spring tree frogs and all.

            Doris has transformed an over-furnished two bed/bath apartment into a cozy but more spacious den.  She can’t move walls, but she has moved a plethora of faux greenery and other ugly stuff into the depths of closets.  She persuaded Forest management to remove the clunky old cathode ray TV: it might leak fumes harmful to fragile lungs—so she says.  

With the monster cabinet banished to the small bedroom to store my memoir files, we can forage for the recliner of my dreams.  Our new friend Pete, partner of Gene, who’s a friend of Victoria’s from the Wisconsin in Scotland program, gives us some hot tips about second hand furniture shops.  (Victoria and I taught at Dalkeith outside Edinburgh where I also lived in spring 2005 and fall 2007.)  Doris finds a gently used grey leather recliner at Collectibles and makes friends with owner Blake, who gives us a discount and promises to pray for me.

On Doris’s first Friday in Durham, I suggested we celebrate my completing another week of exercise by discovering the Food Lion near the edge of my forest, one supermarket Lisa and I had not explored.   Zipping around on their motorized cart I filled my basket with necessaries and treats such as ice cream—two recycle bags full.

When Doris went to start the Jeep, it clicked and went black.  Battery?  I thought not, but Doris thought it worth a try. Triple A came to give us a battery jump.  No luck.  Thus I had to start my AAA request all over.  Finally a tow truck arrived.  The starter needs to be replaced.  Symbolic of my life?  Meanwhile, Doris must follow the Jeep and meet the mechanic who’s holding his shop open awaiting our arrival.  

Need I mention that it’s raining, our ice cream’s melting (minor problem), we need a ride home, and I’m always in danger of running out of oxygen (potential major problem).  Lisa’s old friend Karen comes to the rescue.  She follows the tow truck and takes us home.

Doris makes friends with Ken the mechanic and shop owner; he writes my name down for his church’s prayer list and gives us 20% discount because of my lung condition.  She’s charmed all the good ol’ boys.  I’ve noticed the slightest southern drawl creeping into some of Doris’s vowel sounds.    The following Tuesday Gene picks Doris up and takes her to Ken’s shop to pick up my Jeep while I’m at the Fitness Center.

I made another new friend here in Durham through an online memoir writers’ workshop Feb-March 2011 led by Lisa Dale Norton http://www.lisadalenorton.com. Diane, http://www.bydianedaniel.com/, journalist and travel writer, wrote about her husband becoming her wife, a piece of her forthcoming book.  Diane and Lina’s story appeared as the feature in the Sunday Raleigh News and Observer a couple of weeks ago.  I met Diane for coffee between getting my nose tube removed at the hospital and rushing off to lunch and exercise.  I look forward to talking more with her about memoir writing.  I’m immensely grateful for these new friends.

Yowch! Nose probe pulled from stomach through nose

Living room with monster TV and cabinet

March 11 Health Report

Results of tests continue to give me the green light toward transplant.  The most surprisingly unpleasant of these was the Esophageal Manometry with 24 hour ph probe.  A lovely woman named Pam inserted a tube up my nose (yowch!) and down into my stomach where it remained 24 hours.  When she and another technician suited up in what looked like Hazmat cover-ups, I guessed I was in for more than I’d bargained.  Dangling the probe tube in front of me, Pam looked me in the eye and said rather solemnly, “I only ask two things: ‘Don’t hit me, and don’t vomit in my face’.”   I’m happy to report no blows or projectile vomiting, and I survived the 24 hours.  Results indicate acid reflux and probable need for stomach wrap surgery after transplant. 

            Last week, along with the usual labs, x-rays, and pulmonary function tests with arterial blood gas draw, I saw Laurie Snyder, MD, a post-transplant critical care specialist, who said that I am close to being listed. They’re pleased with my progress at the Duke Center for Living (DCL).  I’ve met all the fitness goals. If all goes well, I’ll complete my 23 sessions at the end of next week.   I’m expected to continue in the graduate program up to transplant—same exercises but self-monitored.  (Duke has the most fit transplant patients in the country.  Every day is training for the Olympics.)

When the transplant team deems me ready, they’ll take me off Plavix and list me a week later.  That could happen around the Equinox.  After I’m on the official list, I’ll know my LAS (lung allocation score) based on how bad my lungs are, how likely I am to survive transplant surgery, and my specific needs (small body and lungs, A- blood).  For more information about the lung transplant program, staff, stages, and process go to http://www.dukehealth.org/services/transplants/programs/lung/

            Don’t ask if I’ve been writing memoirs.  I can barely find time for morning journal, a bit of reading, and the luxury of writing this entry.  This week I must get my tax documents and calculations to my tax accountant—at least before I’m “listed” for transplant.  I won’t have time or energy to think about memoir writing until weeks after transplant.  I hope I sail through transplant without the complications we’re learning about.

If you must reach me during that time, I may be able to read email at rkeefe66@msn.com .  You can also email Doris at dorburk@hotmail.com.

Celebrating Lisa Turning 45 at BLU

First Three Weeks in Durham

As I write, Lisa is flying home to Orlando.  She stayed with me three weeks—longest she’s ever been away from Dave and Cheyenne.

            We’ve celebrated Lisa’s forty-fifth birthday twice—well really all week.  When we thought she was leaving Saturday morning, we dined at BLU, the best seafood restaurant in the Triangle according to the Independent weekly—ahi tuna tartare, Cajun grilled scallops and shrimp with shitake over risotto, and warm chocolate cobbler with vanilla ice cream with a birthday candle.  Lisa’s cucumber martini was too strong for her to finish. I took the tiniest taste on tip of tongue and my eyes rolled into the stratosphere.  I’m avoiding alcohol.  I’m bombarding my liver with so much drug destruction, whatever damage I can control, I must. 

            With all Saturday to celebrate, we drove ten miles to Fearington Village, a retirement community and cutesy faux farm featuring belted Galloway cows from Scotland and a village center with shops and restaurants.  We lunched at the Granary, an actual nineteenth century granary.  Lisa chose crab cake on a bed of couscous.  I couldn’t resist the entre with my name on it—rosemary chicken pot pie with heavy cream.  Oddly ironic that I’m struggling to gain weight after an adulthood of trying to lose.  PF melts the flesh off bones.

            After the Village, we stopped at Trader Joe’s for Lisa to stock up on treats for home and groceries.  At Happy Hour time Lisa’s friend Karen arrived with a birthday chocolate cheese cake and flowers from Whole Foods. In case you’re wondering, yes, indeed, eating and more eating is a joy my daughter and I have always shared. No doubt there’s something to be psychoanalyzed there, and I’ve done it with plays, but not my own life.

            Later I’ll describe recent procedures and reports, doctor and clinic visits.  Not to brag, but I’m amazed at my progress in fitness.  My Winter Park nurses prepared me well for Duke boot camp.  Not only have I increased speed and power on track and bike and weights, but I feel stronger every day, even though I feel breathless and melted.

Center for Living

The Forest

Arriving in Durham

The full moon danced along beside my window as my Jeep rolled up the road to Durham.  We arrived at The Forest about 9:30 pm on Wednesday, 2/8.  Lisa drove eleven hours.  My apartment nestles into the Duke Forest, making every drive to/from the corner nest shown above a soothing trek through wilderness.  The apartment complex across the road will fade from visibility as trees leaf out. With a new lung I will be able to walk into the forest not hauling an oxygen tank.

New address: 103 White Pine Drive, Durham, NC 27705.

On Thursday (thanks to Doris’s directions) we found Trader Joe’s. 

On Friday we went to Orientation at the Center for Living at 11 am, and I didn’t emerge until 3:30 after a full physical evaluation and my first afternoon of exercises.  Immediately my admiration and compassion for others treading the same track I’m on expanded.  Some haul two big oxygen tanks on rollators.  I’m only hauling one.  We’re each struggling for the next breath.

Unless we have other appointments at the Clinic or Hospital, we are expected to be there five days a week from 12:30 to 4:30.  After we check in, change out our tanks for theirs, get vitals taken, get our orders for the day, we do floor exercises—stretches with hand and leg weights.   During a ten minute break we replenish fluids and munch granola bars, nuts, and fruit.  From 2 to 3:30 we walk the track for 20-30 minutes, pump the nu-step for 20, and work through a different series each day of weight machines focused on building upper and lower body strength.   I’m amazed at how fit we’re getting with a military precision we’d never have if we weren’t running from the swish of the Grim Reaper’s scythe.

Many walk track with oxygen masks which makes higher flow easier for nasal passages to tolerate   When they put one on me last week, I got claustrophobic.  I’ll practice at home walking and breathing with the mask. Last Tuesday my nose started bleeding from 15 liters pouring through my nose hose as I walked track for 20 minutes.   Slowing my pace a bit so I don’t have to walk with 15 L flow for an extended period, I tell myself I’m working on endurance before pumping up speed.

We and our care givers have required lectures during that last hour Monday through Thursday on topics such as anatomy and physiology, diseases caused by anti-rejection drugs such as osteoporosis and diabetes, transplant procedures and research.

Dr. Davis, thoracic surgeon, that Lisa and I met on Monday, 2/13, was the same person that Doris and I met, but he seemed transformed.  http://www.dukehealth.org/physicians/r_duane_davis  My gorgeous daughter charmed him, so he directed most of his comments and eye contact in her direction.  I'm a data-generating system with more unknown variables than he’d like, as are all lung transplant patients over 60.  He can perform his art in the OR, but something out of his control can go haywire and he loses the patient. 

Lately he’s noticed that patients over 60 who seem completely confident can “fall off the boat” (his term) mentally after surgery.  How can he predict prior to surgery who will fall apart afterward?  Men and type-A personalities seem more prone to break-down.  Youngerpatients, being more predictable, give him more satisfaction.  

There’s a shortage of donor lungs, and many end-stage patients waiting.  Nobody knows who will perform the surgery.  Three thoracic surgeons perform lung transplants.  I perused the profiles of the others and found valuable research data on Dr. Lin’s profile: http://www.dukehealth.org/physicians/shu_s_lin

The drug-eluding stent put in my right coronary artery 6/2/11 when I had the heart attack my first week in Florida concerns Davis most. To keep the stent open a full year, I take Plavix.  Coming off Plavix, as I must for any surgery, might trigger another heart attack, which Davis says would certainly be fatal in my case if it happened in the middle of transplant.  He’d rather my lungs hadn’t declined so rapidly.  I’ve been at “end-stage” for some time now, he tells me bluntly.  I also require small lungs compatible with A negative blood.

I think it’s amazing I’m alive.  I’ve beat the predictions of morbidity in 3-4 years for pulmonary fibrosis.  I’ve had the dry cough symptom for 4 years.  I had first diagnosis 3 years ago, although I wasn’t given the diagnosis from my PCP and put on oxygen until mid-April 2010.  Davis is trying to balance the risks and benefits for patients and the precious commodity of a donor lung.  He must be blunt in describing how the transplant surgery will ravage the whole body, so it has to be worth it.  He’s going to have to tell some patients who’ve come for transplant that the risks are too great.  Go Home.  He doesn’t say, “Make peace and say goodbye,” but it hangs in the air.

Thursday we arrived early for my 1 pm appointment with my assigned pulmonologist, Dr. Gray: http://www.dukehealth.org/physicians/alice_lee_gray  We didn’t emerge until 6 pm after a full array of blood tests, chest x-ray, and pulmonary function test with arterial blood drawn.

In waiting rooms I meet other pre-transplant patients. Patients not hauling oxygen stop to ask if I’m there for a lung transplant and then tell me they had one two or three months ago.  They beam as survivors who’ve climbed the mountain and crossed the bridge and can speak with wisdom and triumph—an antidote to the Davis warnings.  “Do you have Diabetes?” I ask. “What other complications?”

Finally at about 4:30 Dr. Gray’s nurse Kelly asks for updates since I was last there in Jan.  I had a big one.  During my three weeks of departure madness, in addition to farewells, visitors from afar, celebrating my birthday, and last minute appointments, a dermatology check-up revealed two basal cell carcinomas on my head and cheek.  Dr Erica Savage performed Moh’s surgery the last week of January; stitches came out just before my birthday.  (In birthday photos I’m masking the wounded left cheek.) Dr. Gray says that the anti-rejection drugs make me more sensitive to skin cancer.  Having had it once, I’m even more at risk. 

She lays down the law: I must take only Big Pharma approved drugs—synthetics instead of organics, switch to synthetic thyroid instead of the organic form prescribed by my Santa Fe acupuncturist, and forego all herbal remedies—no more blue green algae.

Lisa:     What’s wrong with blue green algae? (Lisa is challenging my doctor.)

Gray:   We don’t know what it is.  It hasn’t been tested.

Lisa:     It’s food. (Is she trying to pick a fight with my gatekeeper?)

Gray:   It’s not regulated by the FDA.

Lisa:     (Pause while Gray is listening to my lungs) What do you do to stay healthy?  

Gray:   (Cutting her eye sharply at Lisa)  I work.

That silences Lisa.  I feel her resentment, as if the doc is saying that flouncing around through alternative medicine is sprinkling pixie dust.  Real grown-ups work.  Lisa and I are both thinking that over working toward her own coronary isn’t helping our doc gray stay in the green or blue.

Gray says to us, “You can take your blue green algae all you want, but you can’t be in our lung transplant program."  I all but shuffle and drop to one knee, trying to reassure the good doctor that, to use their terminology, I’m “compliant,” a term I’d never have used in to describe myself.  I always argue and question, but not now.  I must follow All team rules or be kicked out.  I recall that I’m the one who taught Lisa to question authority.  We had the bumper sticker on our frig in Winter Park.  Nevertheless I get Gray’s message that everything I take must be FDA approved.   Lisa may have charmed the handsome surgeon, but she’s ruffled the pulmonologist.

Lisa has been the ultimate Earth Mother here—washing all the towels, sheets and bedspreads.  We’ve bought new clean pillows and mattress toppers.   

Lisa’s Story of taking care of me: Each afternoon when I drop her off, it's like dropping off my child at summer camp, "Be safe, play well with others." Some days, as caregiver I have educational classes to attend. Yesterday, I learned all about Diabetes: how the pancreas supplies just enough insulin to balance the sugars we eat and take that sugar energy to the cells, and that because all the anti-rejection drugs are so intense during and right after surgery that 90% of patients leave the hospital with Diabetes. Quite shocking! However, they say that it could dissipate after 6 months-2 years. So they also taught us how to check our loved one's blood sugar levels 4 times daily and administer insulin. Another class that I'll probably have while I'm here is "Tube feeding;" not looking forward to that one.

Our morning routine: We each drink an Emercen-C and then a scrumptious blend of Hazelnut, Guatemalan, and French Roast coffee. Mom orders it from NY. Also, she likes a bit of dark chocolate with her coffee. Then I make us the green smoothies or sludge, which consists of fresh spinach and kale, banana, blueberries, strawberries, and whatever other fruit in fridge, Super Green Protein powder, frozen fruit, and some cranberry juice to help the blender beat it all to oblivion. At about 10:30-11 I prepare some sort of second breakfast/ early lunch, so she’ll be ready to work out. In the evening, I’ve enjoyed preparing some yummy meals of baked salmon, salmon over spinach salad, shrimp with pasta and pesto, broccoli Portobello omelet. Since we didn’t have much in the seasonings dept, I’m using fresh garlic and purple onion for everything.

We’ve enjoyed driving through Duke’s photogenic campus.  While I was exercising, Lisa did what she called drive by shootings.  Yesterday we drove through the downtown area and had coffees and shared a mousse at the Beyou Café.  Lisa has connected with old friends Karen and Jeff who live here now.  Last night we went to their house for dinner.  Their three creative children (15, 12, and 9) entertained us throughout dinner.  

Lisa is fixing chicken veggie soup for dinner on our twelfth day here—a productive one for both of us.  I survived a virtual colonoscopy this morning and later a mammogram. I’ve avoided a colonoscopy for 72 years, but Team Transplant requires it, so be it. You’ve either had these or not, so no further details are needed.  I wrote most of this yesterday while fasting and cleaning out my intestines.  Lisa has at last hauled in my file boxes and done her fifth or sixth load of wash after returning from her third trips to Costco and Whole Foods.

Tomorrow morning I have an Esophageal Manometry test with a 24 hour probe to determine how often stomach acid refluxes into the esophagus.  They insert a tube up my nose and down to my stomach and leave it in 24 hours. I have limited nostril space with my nose hose always in place. I guess I can claim to have been probed from stem to stern within 48 hours. I could never have imagined anyone needed all this data.

Lisa’s flight home to Orlando departs at 7am on Sat, Feb 25, her 45^th birthday.  Doris will arrive by car sometime on Sunday, Feb. 26.  More on the Corrales departure later.

My brother Jerry, Lisa's dad Charles, and the DeVores celebrate my birthday

Farewell Florida

On Wednesday, February 8, Lisa and I will drive to the Forest Apartments in Durham, the ones Doris and I selected in January, two miles from Duke Hospital.  On Friday, Feb. 10, I start Orientation at the Center for Living at 11 and the exercise workouts.   We’ve speeded up departure when it became clear that Duke truly wanted me there ASAP.

On Monday, Feb.13, Lisa will meet the thoracic surgeon, that I vilified in my last entry.  On Feb. 16, she’ll meet my assigned pulmonologist.  She’ll wheel me around Duke Clinic and Hospital to other appointments for testing procedures already scheduled through Feb. 22, as Doris did in July, November, and January.  Then she’ll fly back to Orlando, and Doris will arrive.  Stay tuned for schedule.

Saying goodbye this week to folks I’ve known only a short time has been difficult, especially the nurses at Winter Park Hospital Cardio-pulmonary rehab.  Even my massage therapist walked me and my oxygen and bags out to my car and hugged me.  “I’m going to miss you.  I’m not in this for the money.  I really care, and you’re one of my favorite clients.”  I was surprised and touched.   

Dr Marlo and I were near tears when she tucked me into my Jeep in front of the Harmony Wellness Center.  “I’ll keep reading your blog.  Promise you’ll stay in touch.”  I came away glowing with bliss from Marlo’s needles and healing energy flow on Thursday. 

With an extra half hour in my schedule l allowed myself a detour to Azalea Park, my favorite Winter Park nature spot for thirty years.  To my delight the bright fuchsia blossoms were already opening.   I rolled down my windows and pulled out my chicken wrap.  Everything was delicious.

Two white herons chose to entertain me.  One and then the other swooped down from moss-draped cypresses languidly spreading and flapping their giant wings directly in front of my Jeep.  They danced and preened.  Then one after the other spread that incredible whiteness and slowly propelled themselves back up to bounce and sway precariously on tips of branches in front of me.  When they found a good branch, they folded into their sleek profiles as if waiting for J. J. Audubon to paint their portraits.  Good omen for the journey ahead! 

Saying good bye to old friends from thirty years ago is impossible.  I will see them again. Several have stopped by.  On Wednesday, I had lunch with women from my old Pagoda community on Vilano Beach.  Many now live at Alapine, deep in the woods on the northern border of Alabama and Georgia, where Doris and I visited them on our first trip to Florida in Oct 2010 for better breathing at sea level.  How our fiery battles have melted and mellowed us these past thirty years. 

Phone visits with really old friends keep me connected to our past histories.  Two heart-warming conversations stand out.  My best friend Kathleen from third through eighth grade at St Jerome in Chicago called, as she has several times, to reassure me of her prayers and thoughts.  We reminisce about how much more adventurous our childhood and adolescent years were than those of our granddaughters under constant surveillance.  She’s offered to add details to a draft of my memoir in progress in which she’s a leading character about our Nancy Drew escapades and third grade performances.   Kate, a friend from forty years ago in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who visited me for five days in October, spoke of her Buddhist healing circles and the little black cat who’s adopted her.  

While Doris was still here, Rita and Amy from Duluth came by for two days.  Rita the chef brought scallions from her home garden up the north shore for the oven roasted veggies she cooked here with an organic chicken.  The next week Mary Dee and Mary Helen who publish Women in Higher Education came from Madison bearing a big wheel of Wisconsin cheese.  This week also from Duluth Deb and Dianna (just retired from UW-Superior) dropped in with a jug of maple syrup from northern trees and news of old friends. 

For too short an hour Thad and Polly came by on my birthday afternoon.  Polly brought me a jar of her 2012 homemade orange marmalade.  Thad and I mused, as we have on my past whizzing through Florida visits, on the decline of humanistic liberal values, while bolstering our optimism with new causes or just leaning back surveying it all.  Thad was President of Rollins College when I was here.  He came a year before I did and had a hand in hiring me.  He retired a year before I left.  His departure prompted my moving on because I knew that Rollins would never be the same.  I told them, as I’ve told many people, that my happiest years in academia were here, not just because I was young and full of hope in my forties (Lisa’s age), but because Rollins nourished and thrived on true academic openness to new, edgy, eccentric, wild ideas and people—like me . 

Thad’s leadership showed me that a progressive visionary at the top can set the spirit for a whole institution and encouraged me to believe that I could be that sort of leader. I tried to reproduce the Rollins ambience in Missouri and Wisconsin, but it never quite worked because faculty didn’t trust what they’d never seen. They couldn’t believe it wasn’t too good to be true.

Polly and Thad Seymour

Rachel Lights Up Heart

Turning 72

Compared to the seventieth birthday party shared with twin Nancy and fifty women, two years ago in Corrales, the group of ten in my apartment was subdued. My brother Jerry came from Omaha with his girlfriend Lorrie—first time he’s visited me in forty years. Lisa and I stopped for the night on treks across the great prairies—in 2006 on my move to NM and in 2008 on my way from NM to my fiftieth Edgewood High School reunion.  We live in separate worlds but still speak the memories or our shared childhood. We both recalled a photo taken when he was five and I was twelve.  The lighting captures facial bones and coloring, leaving no doubt of our genetic similarity.

Yvonne, Joan, and Rachel came with scrumptious dips and salads.  Little Lisa, who calls me her second mom because she lived with us three years during their high school, came to help Big Lisa, her best friend, and sat at my feet.  Cheyenne made a card about what she loves about Gram. 

Fortunately I won’t be known as the woman who burned Auvers Village to the ground on her way out of town.   But there was a moment of panic when the beautiful hot air (I Love You) heart balloon that Rachel, Lorrie, and Cheyenne launched shot its flames up and out over the dark pond and then caught a cross wind and flew back into a tree not far from a building.  With no kite string to tether it down, the launchers jumped around waving their hands and shouting at it to come down as if it were a wayward cat.  Then the wind shifted, the fire sputtered out, and the balloon careened like a large red leaf down to the water.  Thanks, Rachel, for that splash of love and red siren excitement. 

The gathering wound down slowly.  When only Lisa and Cheyenne remained, I flopped on my bed wiped out, and they piled on the bed with me.

Saturday night Charles joined the group for dinner.  “Have you seen the mermaid carved in sterling silver on my cane?” Charles asked handing me the graceful piece of Victorian erotica.

“What do you need a cane for?” asked Jerry.

“I’m an old man,” asserted Charles.

“But why do you need it?” continued Jerry.

“I’m an old man.  I deserve to have a cane.” I was amused.  They spoke on parallel tracks.  Jerry searched for physical maladies. Charles was displaying an objet d’art.  He always fancied himself a Victorian gentleman.

On Sunday Lisa and Cheyenne helped sort clothes.  Later Rachel, a warm friend for twenty-five years, and her new wife Nicki dropped by for a glass of wine and sweet goodbyes.

On Monday (today) Jerry came at 10:30 for the best visit we’ve had in forty years.  He told me about his success in selling security systems.  Charles and Lisa brought us lunch.  I gave Jerry a quick tour of Winter Park.  They’ve all just left after we dined on take-out Chinese.  Charles kept saying what an amazing convergence of relatives we were after all these years. It did seem a marvel to have my only sibling and my only ex-husband sitting side by side.

I don’t know how quickly I’ll be reconnected to the internet in Durham, so don’t be surprised if I don’t answer emails 2/8-12. Next entry will come from NC.

Jerry Keefe and Charles Curb

Doris with me on the road to new lungs

Lungs 2012

The call from Duke came about 11 on Friday, 1/20/12, as I straddled the edge of the treadmill at Winter Park Hospital Cardio-pulmonary rehab about to hit start button and step on for a mountain climbing twenty minutes. 

“It’s Khara at Duke.  Good News!  Everything checked out fine last week.  We want you to relocate in Durham as soon as possible--in two to four weeks.” My legs turned rubbery.  It’s sooner than I wanted to leave Florida, but not unexpected.  “Let us know when you arrive and where you’re staying so that we can set up more tests.”  Breathless even sitting with my oxygen turned up, I felt the room and its shiny machinery swirling around me.  This is what I’d hoped, and now it terrified me. 

“What if I can’t be there that soon?” I asked.  “Could I come in six weeks?” Doris has at least six weeks of work scheduled in NM after her sixteen days with me in FL. Can Lisa drop everything in her busy life so soon to spend two weeks or more with her mom until Doris joins me in Durham sometime in March?

“We need you to be as strong as possible going into transplant,” says Khara.  That means a minimum of twenty three sessions in our Center for Living.”  I know that.  It will take five or six weeks of five day a week sessions four hours a day from arrival in Durham to be listed.  “We don’t want you to become so sick that you can’t survive surgery.  Pulmonary fibrosis is tricky.  You can plateau for months and then fall off a cliff. We have to be ready for that.”  That reality scares me on a daily basis.

I know how difficult getting enough oxygen has become lately.  For 1.8 mph on the treadmill I need 10-12 liters continuous flow and sometimes 15 (highest it goes).  I need 8-10 to walk to the car or into a restaurant with someone carrying my heavy tank or pushing it myself on my rollator. To get the rollator out of my Jeep, fold it out, and do it in reverse when I’m leaving, I need a helper.  For Duke Doris and Lisa are my primary and secondary caregivers.  But anyone strong enough can swing my tanks and wheels around.

Several have asked, “When is your transplant scheduled?”  Nobody knows when a lung donor will die just when I’m at the top of the lung recipient list with a lung that fits me (small size, A negative blood).  “You top the list,” as Dr Fernandez at National Jewish Health put it, “when you’re the next to . . . [hand gesture: palm up and then down].”  I won’t know I top the list until I get the call.

When I’m close to top of the list (lungs fading out but the rest of my body-mind-spirit hearty from workouts), I get a beeper to tell us when there's a lung for me.

We had to make some quick decisions on Friday before Doris flew home on Saturday morning.  Lisa has agreed to move me to NC mid-February.  We’ll take a minimum of files, books, clothes that we need for 3 to 6 months in a furnished apartment.  Before and after my tests 1/9-13, Doris and I visited four complexes that cater to medical patients near Duke Hospital.  We like Kim’s suggestion, The Forest, less than a mile to exercise and three to Duke Clinic and Hospital.

Next time I’ll give more information on departures and arrivals and my heavy social calendar for the next two weeks leading to my birthday.  Let me know if this has too much detail for you.  Tell me your news.