Medical World Update

            I’ve spent way too much time with doctors and waiting rooms lately.  I’d rather be reading, writing, or pushing a cart around Costco.  Nobody to blame but myself.  I made the appointments.  Seven different doctors in twelve days!  

A new pain got my full attention about two and a half weeks ago—felt like somebody stabbing me in the back.  I woke in the night coughing with a knife in my back. Lungs?  Heart?

At cardio-pulmonary rehab, the nurse taking blood pressure asks, “Are you feeling any pain today?” M, W, and F I admitted I was.  By Friday Nurse Paula insisted I see a doctor.  My PCP doesn’t work Fridays.   She sent me to Centra Care where I spent most of the afternoon in the waiting room with coughing children and twenty-somethings probably lacking health insurance.  It occurred to me that it wasn’t a healthy environment for someone with a suppressed immune system. 

Kindly Dr Wheatly ruled out fracture and muscle sprain by having me twist this way and that.  EKG looked OK.  So I finally agreed to a chest x-ray, although I’ve had too many. He looked at it and went into alarm mode:  “It’s your lungs!  Your lung disease is very advanced.  You must go to the ER at Winter Park Hospital right now.”  I said I was not going to the ER at 5:30 on a Friday.  Did I add that I’d rather tour the lower circles of hell?  The pain has persisted for six days now.  What can happen in a weekend?  “You could die of respiratory failure!” gasps Wheatley.  Cheerful guy.  To escape Centra Care I had to sign a statement that I refused doctor’s orders.

I called Doris who said it was probably a broken heart from stirring up old memories.  I liked this idea much better than respiratory failure.  Was it faculty who wanted to stab me in the back as dean or who had?  More likely it was old girlfriends from 20-30 years ago when I lived right here.  Doris suggested we both meditate for fifteen minutes on removing the knives.  You won’t be surprised that I felt much better after breathing, centering, and visualizing knives dissolving.

            Monday at rehab, I had to admit that the pain continued. Central Florida Pulmonary fit me in.  I spent Tuesday afternoon with my new pulmonologist Dr Layish (who coincidentally had a fellowship at Duke Lung Transplant Center), his nurse, and PA and more tests.  CT scan with contrast dye shot in intravenously showed no blood clots in lungs, just some irritation around staples left over from lung biopsy a year ago at Univ of Colorado Hospital.  Staples?  Can I visualize them dissolving?  I still don’t know why the pain, but as it fades a bit, I’m less concerned.  Incidental good news: DEXA bone density scan showed I no longer have osteoporosis—just osteopenia.  Nurse suggested I might be eligible for new drug trials.  Just what I need—more drugs!

            Meanwhile that Monday afternoon I had an appointment for consultation on a colonoscopy with Dr Kola. Last thing in the world I want, but it’s on the Duke checklist of exams I must have up to date.  I distract myself with a possible limerick: “There once was a colonoscopist named Kola . . .”

As I was making lunch, my oxygen tank went “PFFFFT!” Leaking tank I thought and got out the little plastic wrench to change metal canisters.  New one also went Kaflooie.  Then I remembered this happening in Albuquerque once—worn out washer.  No way to get oxygen supplier to rush out with a handful of metal discs in the next half hour.  I can’t go anywhere without oxygen.  But I can take my Sequel Eclipse portable oxygen concentrator that I use on airplanes.   Portable?  A relative term.  I forgot somebody else is always hauling it for me. 

            Dragging it out of the condo and down the steps and hoisting it into the back seat of my Jeep, all the while attached to it by nose hose, I threw my right shoulder out of whack.  Major joint pain set it two days later.  Now what?  Chiropractor?  Cortisone shot into the joint?  I’d already made an appointment with a new acupuncturist recommended by a woman I’ve never met—a woman who wrote a book about healing with magic wands and other happy woo-woo that was sent to me by a woman of charisma I’d known in WP 25 years ago.  OK so the maze meanders.

            Meanwhile back at the colonoscopist (a sensible and sensitive guy), I was advised that he can only do screening on me—no removal of polyps, if there are any, since I can’t be off Plavix.  He agreed that polyps in colon aren’t my main concern.  Must check with Duke.  At least I can delay this one a bit.

            Tuesday before I went to the pulmonary clinic I found the warehouse headquarters of Lincare oxygen suppliers of Orlando where I scored a handful of tiny metal discs and traded out my canister topper.  Once again I could hoist metal tanks on my shoulder.  Ouch—not the right one!

            Friday morning I saw Cardiologist Dr Hussain out in west Orlando.  He had results from the Berkeley blood profile tests taken four weeks earlier.  I’ll spare you the fascinating details that go on for pages about controllable and genetic risk factors and mention only two red flags: I do have a genetic predisposition to cardiac problems.  (No surprise.  My father died of a second heart attack at age 53, and my brother had one in his fifties.)  Other red mark: my LDL particles are too small; we must fatten them up with a nightly dose of Niacin.  Follow low fat diet, exercise, and come back for re-test in three months.  Cut aspirin dose in half in hopes of diminishing the purple patches and bruises that appear spontaneously up and down my arms and legs if I even brush against anything.

            Now eastward to the healing ocean.  I made it all the way to a surfside bar for a fish taco before I had to turn back into the town of Cocoa and find Dong Ye.  I anticipated yielding my bruised and feeling stabbed body into the healing hands of the angelic new acupuncturist.  I liked the receptionist and the woman who gives ion foot baths, but the doc herself didn’t look like a healer but in need of healing—weary, unsmiling, lumpy grey unhealthy, no joy or vitality. She took my pulses, examined my tongue, and riddled me with a few needles.  I enjoy relaxing on my back, zoning out, giving my healing energy to the needles, allowing my chi to flow as my body heals itself. 

The Doc prescribed that I drink her special tea, take her capsules for back pain twice a day, follow her diet, and come back in a week. Another woman presented me with three bags of twigs and dried leaves that I was to brew one bag at a time in a large stew pot with nine cups of water until cooked it down to three cups—enough for a day and a half, since I was told to drink a cup twice a day.  I was warned it would smell and taste awful.

The diet to cure internal dampness eliminated everything I’d thought was healthy and loved eating.  No fresh anything and no fruit at all.  It boiled down to cooked vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and gluten-free bread.  How would my digestive system react if I suddenly stopped my breakfast of fresh fruit and yogurt?  I already eat cooked veggies daily and either fish, eggs or chicken.  No crusty nine-grain bread?   No salads?  Not to mention no dairy, coffee, wine, or chocolate ever.

When I relayed the prescribed plan to Doris and to Lisa, they both responded with some version of “Have you lost your mind?”  Doris asked if the doc had raked her back yard into the bags.  I had no idea what was in the bags or in the capsules.  I’d been so careful to give every new doc a full list of my prescribed medications and herbal supplements in order to avoid clashes.  Pulmonologists had eliminated many of my herbs as potentially interfering with their potent drugs. 

I emailed the Cocoa acupuncturist asking about the contents of her bags and capsules and how they and her diet would help me.  She replied that to know the answer I’d need to study 6000 years of Chinese medicine.  Most patients come to her dissatisfied with western medicine but feel better after they drink her brew for a week. Her program is cut and dried.  Follow it or not.  Alas I can’t risk drinking an unknown brew.  I’m not dissatisfied with western medicine but needing to counteract the ill effects of western drugs by stimulating my body’s self-healing energies.

Tuesday I had to darken the doorway of another specialist I thought I’d never see again: an Ob/Gyn for a pap smear also required by Duke to be up to date.  I enjoyed my hour in a waiting room full of babies but felt a bit out of place.

Wednesday after rehab I went to yet another new acupuncturist that I simply picked off the internet because she looked so vibrant and reminded me of an old friend who’s now an acupuncturist in California.  I didn’t get an appointment with the woman (not taking new patients) but with her associate Marlo (named for Marlo Thomas she told me) who also has appropriate degrees and licenses.  She reminded me of Lisa—tall, thin, blond, rapid-fire mouth.  She reviewed my medical history and medications and listened to everything I said.  She was delighted to explain everything she was doing with her needles. 

She calls me “Miss Rosemary”—a term of respect she’s learned since she moved South from the Midwest.  Most Black women down here—at least in medical world—call every other woman, patient or practitioner, “Miss first name,” but I’d never known a white woman to do it.  The shadow of the plantation looms here I know, but I’d like to believe the appellation can be reclaimed in a gentler world of women caring for women.  Marlo’s sensitivity to culture charms me.  I spent almost two hours of healing at the Harmony Wellness Center of Maitland and will return there.  My back and shoulder pain have subsided some since Dr Marlo’s treatment.

I’m calling it quits on doctors for a while.  For those who asked how I'm feeling and how’s my writing going, this entry gives you an answer.

Lisa's Granny

Granny died at age 95 on Monday, August 29, at almost midnight.  Charles sent friends and family an email “Momma died” at 3:26 am.  Lisa called me the next morning. 

            Lisa flew from Orlando to Little Rock the previous Wednesday when her dad phoned her, “Come now.  She’s very close.”  He’d said it twice before in the past two years, but when Lisa burst in like sunshine and trumpets, Granny rallied and didn’t die. She rallied this time as well, opened her eyes for the first time in a week and swallowed the sherbet Lisa spooned on her tongue even though she’d refused food for days.  Lisa stayed her first five nights alone with Granny at her house, but on Monday she decided her back needed the firmer mattress in the cabin in the woods.  Charles slept in the Big House on Main Street.  Thus neither only son nor only granddaughter were there when she passed, only the caregiver Tonya.

            Granny’s passing is a blessing for all.  She’d said she wanted to die. Everyone believed she was waiting for one last visit with Lisa.  On Monday of her passing, Charles and Lisa gave her a send-off.  Lisa read her Bible: “There’s a time to live and a time to die.”  Charles, the outspoken atheist, sat down at Granny’s piano and rolled out a repertoire of old Protestant hymns that he thought Granny would enjoy, especially her favorite “Amazing Grace.”

            I remember meeting Granny forty six years ago.  Charles took me to Merkel, Texas, to meet his parents after Christmas 1965.  He called them Big Momma and Big Daddy.  I’d never known anyone remotely like either of them. I’d never seen a town as tiny and barren as Merkel.  Silent unsmiling Big Daddy towered more than a foot over Big Momma, a round smiling embodiment of Southern hospitality. 

When we wheeled up to his childhood home, she was waiting.  Charles swung down from his new blue Chevy pick-up.  “C’mere, boy, you not too old to give your Big Momma some sugar.” He craned down from his 6’4” height, same as his dad, so she could wrap her arms around his neck and plant a big smack on his cheek.  Then she took me in. “Why, Charles, you done fine. She’s right purty—just like a full-blown petunia.”  She almost forgave me being a Yankee.  She reached out to me. “C’mere to Big Momma and gimme some sugar.”  I learned the ritual hugging and kissing known as “sugar.”

She stuffed us with ham and turkey, fresh vegetables from her garden and peach cobbler. I could barely understand her unusual twist of language, but I couldn’t miss her devotion to her son and her warmth toward me.  Before we left, she insisted on getting my measurements. “Always wanted a daughter I could make pretty dresses for.”

A few days ago Charles was going through her papers and came across a letter from me sent in 1969 with Lisa’s latest measurements.  Lisa was two years old. He read it aloud to Lisa and she to me on the phone.  I’m touched that Granny saved that dutiful daughter-in-law letter all these years, or maybe she just forgot to toss it.

            After I left her son in 1971, I assumed she thought ill of me.  But in later years when I visited her with Lisa, most recently in May on our drive from New Mexico to Florida, she seemed to accept me as still part of her family.

            Lisa got to know Granny as full of fun and vitality on summer visits to Merkel.  She remembers picking beans off the vine and stringing them.  She enjoyed Granny playing the piano and singing.  Sitting on the front porch, they’d eat watermelon and spit the seeds out to the wide dusty West Texas horizon.  Lisa wrote down some of these memories and read them yesterday at the memorial at Cherry Street Baptist Church in Clarksville, Arkansas.

            Charles promised his momma that he’d take her to be buried in Merkel beside Big Daddy.  Today Charles and Lisa are driving his big white van that usually hauls antiques 10-12 hours from Clarksville to Merkel.  At 3 pm they fetch Dave at the Dallas airport.  I imagine an aerial shot of the van with its four passengers—three living and one in a box—careening down the final stretch of west Texas trailing plumes of dust.   

            Cheyenne hardly knew her great grandmother in her prime of vitality.  But Charles says she looks like Granny at the same age.  Indeed a studio portrait of Neta Spears taken eighty years ago in her teens shows the same lustrous dark hair, wise penetrating gaze, full cupid’s bow lips, and a flash of extraordinary beauty with a hint of Cherokee cheek bones.

            I will remember you fondly, mother-in-law, Big Momma Granny Neta Spears Curb.

Living in Winter Park

For one week, as of tonight, I’ve been enjoying my own space to read, think, write, stretch, do yoga, and venture forth into territory where I lived for 14 years.  Harriet and Bonnie, who live summer and fall in Wisconsin, have graciously given me their winter/spring condo. 

Elegant Winter Park is Orlando’s Berkeley, Corrales, Oak Park.  Wealthy New Yorkers have mansions circling Lake Virginia in the shadow of Rollins College.  Giant oaks drape their branches forming canopies over brick streets where the perfectly groomed putter along in sports cars I can’t identify from golf to tennis to lunch or shopping on Park Avenue at J Jill, Coldwater Creek,  Chico’s, Williams and Sonoma.  A past Rollins president who collected Tiffany glass left his legacy to the Morse Museum, now the finest Tiffany collection on display in the world.

When I lived here in a humbler bungalow bordering WP and Orlando, I enjoyed afternoons grading papers or reading at East India Ice Cream on Park Avenue where the flavors changed hourly, and coffee was strong enough to keep me alert through a pile of freshman comp essays.  I’d bike over (4-5 blocks from my office) and prop my bike against the patio brick wall.  Students and colleagues often stopped to chat.

The previous 12 days at Casa DeVore I jumped to the racing rhythms of three businesses run out of their home.  A few times I took Cheyenne to swim practice, the family to dinner, and Lisa to lunch just the two of us.  Mostly I read and answered email in my room.  Lisa and Cheyenne alternately flopped down on my bed to tell me their tale du jour—Lisa’s bright ideas from a seminar on photographing babies (her favorite human subjects—no bad hair days or pretensions) and Cheyenne’s swim progress and freshman orientation. I enjoyed tuning in to their daily dramas.

My first few days here I’ve revived by reading, resting, unpacking.  Cheyenne snared the last two books in the Hunger Games series at the library, and I devoured them in two days.  If you need to bury yourself in a plot-driven futurist thriller, forget your problems and the whole outside world, go for these books.  The central character, 14 to 17, grapples with grown-up moral dilemmas more complicated than I imagined facing the 13 and up set.  Who knows what fevers the teen imagination today?  Reading Terry Castle’s memoir essays in The Professor provided a reminder to treat even those that I believe injured me with compassion and grace.

Now I’m spreading out my files so that I can get on writing about my life when I first moved here in August 1979.  I’ve excavated a journal June-Dec 1979 detailing my last two months in Missouri, my fears about the future, and my joy at Rollins College.  The journal gives minimal focus to professional mountains I thought I had to climb.  Quite contrarily it harbors tales of floods of attractive women I’m enjoying and the women’s communities I’m joining, especially Pagoda on Vilano Beach.  Alas I’m the Fool stepping off the edge of the cliff—impulsive but visionary, driven by passions and obsessions, miraculously landing on her feet.  Angels buoy up the little fool. 

Now in Week 3 of cardio-pulmonary rehab, I think I’m growing stronger.  Nurses hook me up to an EKG as I warm up, stroll the treadmill, pedal the stationary bike, swirl the upper body hand crank, cool down.  They monitor blood pressure and record oxygen saturation throughout.  I feel like a race horse chomping for more but know I can’t go farther faster sooner until they say.

Old friends have emerged, and my social calendar expands.  Today I missed my colleague Kate at Brio’s in WP (Mercury in Retrograde?)  I arrived 15 minutes early, accepted a table, gave the greeter Kate’s name and description.  Kate arrived 5 minutes later, did the same, but waited for me out front.  When Kate was 40 minutes late, I called her home phone (her cell was off), alarmed her partner, and ordered lunch.  Kate also came in, looked around, didn’t see me, and had her own lunch.  How could the greeter not have connected us?  How could we not have seen each other?

More next time on FL pulmonologists I’m consulting or maybe my musing on Home.  What does Home mean to you?  What have you been thinking, reading, seeing, enjoying?

Celebrating Cheyenne's Shakespeare Camp

Duke Lung Transplant Center

Fifty two years ago today, August 4, 2011, I received the white Dominican habit and died to the world as Rosemary Keefe to be reborn as Sister Mary Geralda.  Happiest day of my life! After a year as a postulant at the Motherhouse, I entered the Dominican Sisters at Sinsinawa, Wisconsin.

Three weeks of no blog means I’ve been busy.  Doris and I spent sixteen wonderful days together in Florida and traveling.  Doris arrived in time to help move me out of Indian Harbor Beach condo.  Even though I’d only been there a month, I had not only books, files, clothes, laptop, printer, oxygen tanks, etc., but also bags and coolers of food that Lisa had brought that I hadn’t eaten—enough to sustain us on our trip to Durham, NC, without having to eat out.  My Jeep sagged as we struggled to exit Florida after too many errands.  On I-95 blinding rain battered us all the way to Jacksonville.  We arrived in Savannah with no time to explore that historic town.  From coolers, we enjoyed shrimp, salmon, crusty bread, libations, sweet treats as rains continued. 

Next day we pushed north but hit a standing still traffic jam on I-95 in SC.  It felt as if our resolve was already being tested.  Could we face the rigors ahead?   We followed gutsy fellow travelers making a U-turn back to the previous exit, where I navigated us on two-lane US highways slowly through rural SC toward Charlotte, NC.  We enjoyed seeing small town America.  An old friend of Doris’s from Springfield, now living in Charlotte, brought pizza, stories, and laughter to our motel room. 

When we arrived in Durham on Sunday, we got serious about preparing for Duke Lung Transplant Center evaluation.  Along with my medical history, Doris and I had to fill out separate puzzling psychological evaluations as patient and primary caregiver.  Would we pass? 

Orientation by Transplant Coordinator emphasized pre and post-transplant rigor.  We must live in Durham at least two months before transplant as I’m moving toward being “listed.” During that time I must participate in the rehab program four hours a day five days a week plus constant re-testing.  A transplant might be available in the first month, or it could take many months.  Every day you wait for the call that will change your life.  They advise planning to stay in Durham for a year following transplant for more rigorous rehab.  I must take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of my life, drugs which trigger diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol in 50% of transplants even though I never had these pre-transplant.

We believe we passed our hour-long consultation with the psychologist.  We also passed our interview with the social worker and financial consultant.  Medical costs alone total $157,000 in 2010, not including cost of re-location.  Medicare pays 80%.  My secondary from Wisconsin pays zilch for transplants, so I must now shop for an additional plan to tack on to Medicare.

The nurse warned us that our assigned transplant surgeon Dr. Steele was blunt.  “The best transplant is no transplant,” he said, after he outlined the difficulty of the process and the need for total commitment on our part.  Transplant world must become our total lives for more than a year.  Duke has good survival rates after a year and five years but not so good in my age category.  After chest x-ray and blood (28 vials?), I pushed my way through pulmonary function tests that I loathe: I end up coughing and being re-tested until I’m about to pass out.  My respiratory therapist was kind.

A week later, the lung transplant coordinator announced that we’re accepted.  I must do pulmonary rehab at least three days a week and return to Duke for re-testing in four months.  I’ve begun a program at Winter Park Hospital which combines cardio and pulmonary.  At first I was told next opening for orientation was Aug 22.  I said, “Oh no, I want to start today.”  The head nurse said she’d fit me in on Wed and then called back to say, “Come today.”

My over-medication problem has been alleviated some by changing cardiologists.  When I studied the report by the doc who saved my life, I was impressed with his details.  I remembered his enthusiasm, immediately wanting me to see what he’d done on a video screen without raising my head, which I was told I must not do while the tube was still inserted in my groin.  Why isn’t he my cardiologist?  I found him online while we were in Durham and called his office on our return drive.  Miraculously he was able to see me that Friday.  He’s young (39) from Pakistan and full of energy.  I’m one of his success stories.  He’s changed my meds, and I’m feeling better.  He’s ordered a comprehensive blood profile with a genetic component to determine how my body responds to different drugs.  It takes three weeks to run.  Barriers are dissolving in the flow.

Maiden Mother Crone

Last Journal from Indian Harbour Beach

Last night a gibbous moon was shining high over a calm Atlantic Ocean.  Yesterday morning I drove myself to a Hospital off US 1 near Melbourne for blood tests ordered by cardiologist Kothari in FL and pulmonologist Fernandez in Denver.  I’d wanted both docs to get results for all tests, but they get only what each ordered.  I’d like to lose the dizzy, drowsy, weak, exhausted effects from the cardio cocktail. “Doctor’s orders” may not be best. 

A week ago I took myself off Pravastatin to control high cholesterol, which I’ve never had.  Post-heart-attack drugs are prescribed one-size-fits-all need it or not.  Pravastatin made me dopey and so weak and wrung out that I could barely lift and carry my oxygen tank.  For 3-4 nights I took half tabs and then went cold turkey after a chat with a pharmacist at Publix where Lisa and I were grocery shopping last Friday.  Now 3-4 days off the drug, I’m feeling stronger.  I walked down to the beach two evenings needing less oxygen.  After blood tests today, I stopped at Walgreens and pushed my oxygen tank in the cart.  Farewell, zombie-world. 

Lisa, Cheyenne, and Dave came last Thursday for two nights.  We went out for seafood the first night.  On Friday Lisa woke up excited to see the last launch of the space shuttle.  We saw it full blast from the beach.  That afternoon Lisa and Cheyenne baked chocolate chip cookies. Later Lisa made two large spinach quiches—one for dinner and one for me for later.  Both nights we played Pictionary in teams.  Dave and Cheyenne were helpless against the mother/daughter duo that reads each other’s minds.  Oddly enough Cheyenne and I often drew identical clues for our teammate.  After noon Friday, the whirlwind swept out my door.

Doris arrives 1 pm tomorrow from ABQ.  We’ll pack up my stuff in time for 10 am Friday check-out.  We head up I-95 toward Durham, NC and my Evaluation for acceptance at Duke Heart-Lung Transplant Center.  (Send blessings and prayers!)  We return to Orlando for Cheyenne’s Shakespeare performance and more travel.  Doris will fly back to ABQ for Aug.  Lisa’s home will be my Aug. base camp, but I hope to find a space of my own to continue my writing and meditating.  I won’t be accessing email as often until Aug.

With only two days left in this beautiful ocean spot I’m assessing my time.  I’d hoped to do more writing, more walking on beach, more venturing out.  Zombie state prevented it.  Days I could barely peel myself out of my recliner I dozed over reading.  I brought along old journals and files of letters received and copies of letters sent.  My complete log of the horror story at my first teaching job in Joplin gave me exact names, dates, even times of events.  Reading old documents, I learned much about myself and people in my life back then that I’d forgotten. 

I’ve stared at the crashing waves pondering the ebb and flow of those desperate years when I was rushing forward into adventures with outcomes I couldn’t foresee.  The Joplin memoir needs work, but that can wait until Aug.  Lisa and I talked about her Joplin memories, significant changes--going through puberty.  On Sunday I talked with the other most significant person in my life then, who has her own memories of that time.  No time now to begin the Fayetteville years (1968-76) or the central to LN years in Winter Park (1979-93). 

Reading has sustained me.  To stimulate my memoir writing, I re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird but laid it aside as words in my head crowded out reading.  I read The Pleasure of Their Company, Doris Grumbach’s memoir of turning eighty and her gratitude for the brilliant people in her life.  In An Improvised Life, Alan Arkin narrates his life as an actor and reminds us that we are all improvising our lives, so be authentic.

Kathleen Hill’s lyrical novel Still Waters in Niger reads like a memoir.  A woman returns to desert town where she lived 17 years ago.  Her daughter’s working in a clinic, part of the intimate native culture.  The woman tries to understand how she failed her daughter in the past as she observes the warm intimate mother bonds of native women.

Pat G sent me Sinister Wisdom #82 on Lesbian Lives in the 70s in which she has a witty memoir of her clashes with her mother in Boston.  I devoured the issue in a single day, thrilled to read words of old friends and remember the times I’m now writing about when we were filled with hope and joy and struggle creating lesbian nation.

Cheyenne’s been sharing novels she’s enjoyed with me (teen/young adult).  Two weeks ago she brought Moon Riders. “I think you’ll like this, Gram,” she said shyly smiling.  Did I ever enjoy a tale of Amazon warriors who give girls Cheyenne’s age training in the ways of the old women, a tradition under threat by the new religion of Apollo in Troy on the brink of war!  Cassandra joins the moon riders.  They rescue Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s dagger in a mist.  Matriarchy reigns in the nomadic clans that support moon riders.  On Thursday she brought The Hunger Games.  It portrays a dystopian bureaucracy in which teens are selected by lottery to battle to death for the entertainment of viewers—not unlike popular TV so-called reality shows.

I opened a box I thought was all Lesbian Nuns and it turned out to be everything else—a box we’d never opened in NM.  There was Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution inscribed to my mother on Mother’s Day 1978.  Did she read it?   

I mentioned reading Barbara Walker’s brilliant treatise Crone earlier.  Re-reading When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone brought back my awe of discovery 35 years ago.

The prime treasure was an original paperback of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, 1980), inscribed to me by my dear friend Dorothy.  On the title page under Audre’s name, Dorothy has written in her fine artistic pencil “passed to Spirit from her Mother Earth Dec ’92.” Dorothy passed to Spirit 15 years later at Winter Solstice 2007.  I let my grief and healing tears wash over me, feeling a hole in my heart, missing them both.

The book includes the speech I remember Audre giving on the “Lesbians and Literature” panel at MLA, December 1977, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”  Audre rallied us into action.  I carried her poetry in my backpack the next few years, a touchstone to women of power.  I taped “A Litany for Survival” over my desk.

My first semester at Rollins (fall 1979), the poet colleague who planned “Winter Term with the Writers,” asked who I’d like to bring.  We invited Audre who gave a spectacular reading in an African dress and turban that made her look like a goddess.  The reading drew the Black community, women’s community, and poetry community in a beautiful space on Lake Virginia.  Next day I drove Audre to Gainesville and we became friends.  In my letter file, I found one from her dated Sept 8, 1980, with a sly offer to return: “Tell Rollins they need a Black Lesbian Feminist Troublemaker’s visits to keep them juicy!” Audre was definitely juicy.   

Here and now Audre’s words became my spirit reading.  I carried the book to Denver, reading only a few pages at a time, in awe of Audre’s powerful anger:  How do my experiences with cancer fit into the larger tapestry of my work as a Black woman, into the history of all women?  And most of all, how do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy? Audre’s words struck my core.  I’ve resisted deeper darker feelings rising into consciousness.  Audre’s honesty will help me search my soul.