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.