Acts of Forgiveness
It's been such a long time since my last blog, that I am almost embarrassed to crawl back here.
I feel like I have failed as a Catholic to uphold one of my sacrifices. The one about going to confession. That awful feeling of having to show up in that little curtained booth and proclaim to the faceless priest across the filigreed wood panel: "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been {{{{long, pensive pause}}} blank months/years since my last confession. Frown.
Awkward silence.
Then a toneless voice..."Go on, my child." Now, instead of arranging my sins in order of lesser evils in my head, I'm more struck by the fact that a man of the cloth, sworn by antiquated laws to a life of celibacy, is calling me his child. I wonder if it's weird for him, too. But then I start because, well, isn't that what I came in here for - some kind of human-to-God-to-middle-man absolution of my sins? And at the end of this tell-all, I will get my prescribed count of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to cleanse my soul and I will feel such relief in the end.
Well, I hardly think Absence of Blogger is a mortal sin, but I ask for forgiveness nonetheless. As the kiddies say today: My bad!
Quite a few things have transpired, since I last wrote -- so many that I refuse to drag them all back here for my own amusement. Suffice it to say the changes were many, causing me to drastically edit my blogger profile! I no longer reside in New Jersey. My dog is living with relatives. I am not a homeowner. Some things change and some stay the same.
Most important of all changes, I have ceased being part of that most enviable group: The Thirty-somethings. Officially, I have entered the 40 Zone. And say what you want about 40 being the new 20 or 30 or whatever. I am here to bear witness, by aches if not by appearance, that 40 is for sure NOT the new 20. Ouch! Is that my knee cracking, as I crawl back in here?
Upon my insistence, we went on vacation to celebrate the unavoidable leap into a new decade. Part of that was me trying to hide from the world, as I let the date pass over me like a dark cloud. Dramatic? Why, yes, I am!
Though I chose not to create any hoopla (of the partying kind) surrounding the so-called Big Day, I did, in fact, do something to make it poignant, if only to myself. I went back to the San Diego Zoo on July 6, 2010.
Why the big deal?
You see, in July of 1989, while in the midst of a celebratory trip afforded to me by my parents, I visited the world-renowned zoo in the lovely city of San Diego for the first time. However, back then I was only able to see a full 20 minutes or so of the gargantuan place. And if you have ever made your way west, young man, you know that 20 minutes at the San Diego Zoo is the equivalent of visiting Italy for 24 hours. Not doable!
But back to me.
In 1989, unbeknownst to me, I had become increasingly ill without symptoms. That's the worst kind of ill because you have nothing to base your sudden relapse on. I had been sick, technically speaking, since 1981. But it was the kind of illness that could be 'managed' with medications. What I was in for was more of...an avalanche.
There I was with my cousins and aunt in tow, making our way around the caged monkeys. Fools that we were, my cousin and I were mocking them through the fence with tongues and wagging fingers. Who looked more like a monkey, I wonder? As I said, there I was just a typical tourist at the zoo. Suddenly, a combination of heat, poorly chosen and consumed greasy fare and dwindling failure of my kidneys, caused me to hit the ground like a safe.
In the next few minutes that I recall, I was the new attraction at the zoo. I was being ogled by hundreds of people as I lay on the rough terrain trying to catch a breath. Next thing, I was being lifted into an ambulance strapped to a gurney. Oddly, I worried more about ruining my family's day at the zoo than of what was going on with me; selfless martyr that I have always been!
I remember several things. My cousin Jackie was shaking almost as much as I was. She was a wreck. She rode in the back of the ambulance with me and bit her nails to the quick the whole time. She was sweating, or was that crying? It was hard to tell from that horizontal angle I was on. I imagine she worried about what she would tell my parents who, calmly from Queens, New York, entrusted her with their first-born.
I remember the pain behind my eyeballs. It was as if they would explode from my skull, if we hit a bad pothole. I remember telling the EMT nurse in the rocking, screeching ambulance not to touch my head because my hair hurt. My hair? More precisely, each follicle of every strand ached to no end.
I remember that sweet-faced, young EMT nurse deftly locating and piercing a vein in my arm - in that shaky hospital-on-wheels - and proclaiming her success: "I got it!" I am what is called a "hard stick" because of my hide-and-seek veins, so she had reason to cry victory! I remember the bag of clear liquid she perched on a built-in hook and slid closer to my head. I remember the microscopic drip that started to flow into me. I remember she looked as scared as I should have been. I remember I was in and out of consciousness, but during the times when I appeared out and was in, I heard things like: "Very serious", "Bad shape" and "Hope she makes it". Just what you want to hear on a complimentary ambulance ride through a city that is not your own.
Her EMT partner, a young, Hispanic man (quite a rare find in southern California) was unable to hear her laments, as he had his stethescope plugs in his ears and was squeezing my arm in an old, dirty blue cuff. "Her BP is crazy high. How old did you say you were, Miss?" I know I said 17, but I might have been 18. I don't know what side of July 6 the clock was on by then.
After that I was really out. It could have been 10 minutes, for all I knew. Maybe it was more like 10 hours because when I woke up again in the emergency room, my life was completely different.
I was told the following:
My trip was surely about to end that night at the University of California San Diego Medical Center. My levels of pretty much everything measurable were 'off the charts'. They had spoken to my physician back home and he told them to send me back ASAP. They questioned his...medical expertise. How could he not know his patient's kidneys were shut down?
Shut down? WTF? Although, now that I think about it "WTF" wasn't even in vogue then, not invented anyhow, so I probably thought something else. Something more along the lines of: "Are you freaking kidding me?" Ah, the 1980s. Such a simpler time for the English language.
I was on the first flight back to New York's JFK like discarded underwear. That's how I felt. Aside from the emotional state of affairs, I also felt oddly bloated and old. If this is what 18 is supposed to feel like, I want no part of it! Ha! What would that girl say about 40 now?
We cleared security at the airport in the blink of an eye, what with being pre-Nine-Eleven and all. What was that I said about those nostalgic 1980s again? My aunt accompanied me back on the flight. She looked terrified. If we spoke five words the whole way, it was too much. We were both numb with shock. What was going to be at the opposite end of this flight, I wondered. My trip was done. My vacation was over mid-way. My life? That was to be determined.
Back in New York, I was taken directly to the hospital seemingly right off the tarmac. I was put on something called dialysis, which I vaguely recall as pain, pain and, um, more of that crazy pain. Even as I sit here now I can say without a doubt that (for me) dialysis was and is, by far, the worst form of ongoing, legal torture in our modern day!
And that's all I'm gonna say about that! ~~~ Forrest Gump, 1994
Flash forward to 2010 because, seriously, you can probably imagine the rest. I am four-time-kidney transplanted patient. Lucky and blessed me. Blessed? For sure! What else can you call striking it rich four times? Today I am, for all intents and purposes, healthy - deaths and floods, loss and heartache, infertility and relapses, career lows and other such failures notwithstanding. All of these have made that elusive HAPPY condition harder to come by! But I am working on it!
My husband loves me madly and that's a good start.
So that was my purpose - my raison d'être - in returning to the zoo this year. I had unfinished business there.
My aunt and cousins said that it looked pretty bad that dark July day in 1989, both in the ambulance and later at the hospital. They even worried I wouldn't make the whole flight back. They worried more when the medical personnel agreed with them. I was told my pressure was stubbornly resistant to the drugs prescribed. My swelling (face, arms, legs and feet) was getting more dangerous with every passing moment. My toxic build-up was terrifying even to those seasoned doctors. People with my numbers just didn't take plane rides well, let alone go untreated safely. By the time we landed, I was nearly unrecognizable, even to my parents, who would have been hard pressed to pick me out of a line-up.
In the end, what I wanted was simple.
I wanted to go back to San Diego, not so much to see what I failed to see of the zoo back in 1989. I wanted to go back for that kind EMT who looked so worried, while she watched the IV drip into my body. I wanted to go back for her wonderful young partner who seemed appalled by my pressure, at my tender age. I wanted to go back for the doctors who treated me in the emergency room and the ones who shook their heads dismayed. The ones who ran around to work on me. The ones who decided it was best I go home. The ones who did what they could to keep me alive, until I could be helped here.
I wanted to go back to fix the memories, which I allowed myself to corrode with only the bad things. I purposely left out of the memories the days in 1989 when we went to Sea World and Universal Studios without any drama . I left out my first encounter in La Jolla's majestic coves. Places I went back to this month because I wanted to experience them feeling as great as I do now.
Truly, I wanted to go back because for a long, long time I remained angry at myself for something that was completely out of my control: Being sick. I needed the resolution of forgiveness, even if it didn't come by the old fashioned way at church. I needed this zoo, where I once almost lost my life, to become the church for my poisoned mind.
I wanted to go back for anyone who ever doubted that I would survive in 1989. I wanted to walk to that same cage where new monkeys reside, but this time, I wanted to keep going...
And I did.
(*PHOTOS: 1 -Statue of "Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus" outside Our Lady of the Sea Church in La Jolla, CA. Veronica is my Confirmation name, so I had to think this was a sign!
2- Entrance to the famed San Diego Zoo. 3- Joe and me by the one ride we took at the Zoo.
4 -Me outside Seaport Village in San Diego County, July 2010)
I feel like I have failed as a Catholic to uphold one of my sacrifices. The one about going to confession. That awful feeling of having to show up in that little curtained booth and proclaim to the faceless priest across the filigreed wood panel: "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been {{{{long, pensive pause}}} blank months/years since my last confession. Frown.
Awkward silence.
Then a toneless voice..."Go on, my child." Now, instead of arranging my sins in order of lesser evils in my head, I'm more struck by the fact that a man of the cloth, sworn by antiquated laws to a life of celibacy, is calling me his child. I wonder if it's weird for him, too. But then I start because, well, isn't that what I came in here for - some kind of human-to-God-to-middle-man absolution of my sins? And at the end of this tell-all, I will get my prescribed count of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to cleanse my soul and I will feel such relief in the end.
Well, I hardly think Absence of Blogger is a mortal sin, but I ask for forgiveness nonetheless. As the kiddies say today: My bad!
Quite a few things have transpired, since I last wrote -- so many that I refuse to drag them all back here for my own amusement. Suffice it to say the changes were many, causing me to drastically edit my blogger profile! I no longer reside in New Jersey. My dog is living with relatives. I am not a homeowner. Some things change and some stay the same.
Most important of all changes, I have ceased being part of that most enviable group: The Thirty-somethings. Officially, I have entered the 40 Zone. And say what you want about 40 being the new 20 or 30 or whatever. I am here to bear witness, by aches if not by appearance, that 40 is for sure NOT the new 20. Ouch! Is that my knee cracking, as I crawl back in here?
Upon my insistence, we went on vacation to celebrate the unavoidable leap into a new decade. Part of that was me trying to hide from the world, as I let the date pass over me like a dark cloud. Dramatic? Why, yes, I am!
Though I chose not to create any hoopla (of the partying kind) surrounding the so-called Big Day, I did, in fact, do something to make it poignant, if only to myself. I went back to the San Diego Zoo on July 6, 2010.
Why the big deal?
You see, in July of 1989, while in the midst of a celebratory trip afforded to me by my parents, I visited the world-renowned zoo in the lovely city of San Diego for the first time. However, back then I was only able to see a full 20 minutes or so of the gargantuan place. And if you have ever made your way west, young man, you know that 20 minutes at the San Diego Zoo is the equivalent of visiting Italy for 24 hours. Not doable!
But back to me.
In 1989, unbeknownst to me, I had become increasingly ill without symptoms. That's the worst kind of ill because you have nothing to base your sudden relapse on. I had been sick, technically speaking, since 1981. But it was the kind of illness that could be 'managed' with medications. What I was in for was more of...an avalanche.
There I was with my cousins and aunt in tow, making our way around the caged monkeys. Fools that we were, my cousin and I were mocking them through the fence with tongues and wagging fingers. Who looked more like a monkey, I wonder? As I said, there I was just a typical tourist at the zoo. Suddenly, a combination of heat, poorly chosen and consumed greasy fare and dwindling failure of my kidneys, caused me to hit the ground like a safe.
In the next few minutes that I recall, I was the new attraction at the zoo. I was being ogled by hundreds of people as I lay on the rough terrain trying to catch a breath. Next thing, I was being lifted into an ambulance strapped to a gurney. Oddly, I worried more about ruining my family's day at the zoo than of what was going on with me; selfless martyr that I have always been!
I remember several things. My cousin Jackie was shaking almost as much as I was. She was a wreck. She rode in the back of the ambulance with me and bit her nails to the quick the whole time. She was sweating, or was that crying? It was hard to tell from that horizontal angle I was on. I imagine she worried about what she would tell my parents who, calmly from Queens, New York, entrusted her with their first-born.
I remember the pain behind my eyeballs. It was as if they would explode from my skull, if we hit a bad pothole. I remember telling the EMT nurse in the rocking, screeching ambulance not to touch my head because my hair hurt. My hair? More precisely, each follicle of every strand ached to no end.
I remember that sweet-faced, young EMT nurse deftly locating and piercing a vein in my arm - in that shaky hospital-on-wheels - and proclaiming her success: "I got it!" I am what is called a "hard stick" because of my hide-and-seek veins, so she had reason to cry victory! I remember the bag of clear liquid she perched on a built-in hook and slid closer to my head. I remember the microscopic drip that started to flow into me. I remember she looked as scared as I should have been. I remember I was in and out of consciousness, but during the times when I appeared out and was in, I heard things like: "Very serious", "Bad shape" and "Hope she makes it". Just what you want to hear on a complimentary ambulance ride through a city that is not your own.
Her EMT partner, a young, Hispanic man (quite a rare find in southern California) was unable to hear her laments, as he had his stethescope plugs in his ears and was squeezing my arm in an old, dirty blue cuff. "Her BP is crazy high. How old did you say you were, Miss?" I know I said 17, but I might have been 18. I don't know what side of July 6 the clock was on by then.
After that I was really out. It could have been 10 minutes, for all I knew. Maybe it was more like 10 hours because when I woke up again in the emergency room, my life was completely different.
I was told the following:
My trip was surely about to end that night at the University of California San Diego Medical Center. My levels of pretty much everything measurable were 'off the charts'. They had spoken to my physician back home and he told them to send me back ASAP. They questioned his...medical expertise. How could he not know his patient's kidneys were shut down?
Shut down? WTF? Although, now that I think about it "WTF" wasn't even in vogue then, not invented anyhow, so I probably thought something else. Something more along the lines of: "Are you freaking kidding me?" Ah, the 1980s. Such a simpler time for the English language.
I was on the first flight back to New York's JFK like discarded underwear. That's how I felt. Aside from the emotional state of affairs, I also felt oddly bloated and old. If this is what 18 is supposed to feel like, I want no part of it! Ha! What would that girl say about 40 now?
We cleared security at the airport in the blink of an eye, what with being pre-Nine-Eleven and all. What was that I said about those nostalgic 1980s again? My aunt accompanied me back on the flight. She looked terrified. If we spoke five words the whole way, it was too much. We were both numb with shock. What was going to be at the opposite end of this flight, I wondered. My trip was done. My vacation was over mid-way. My life? That was to be determined.
Back in New York, I was taken directly to the hospital seemingly right off the tarmac. I was put on something called dialysis, which I vaguely recall as pain, pain and, um, more of that crazy pain. Even as I sit here now I can say without a doubt that (for me) dialysis was and is, by far, the worst form of ongoing, legal torture in our modern day!
And that's all I'm gonna say about that! ~~~ Forrest Gump, 1994Flash forward to 2010 because, seriously, you can probably imagine the rest. I am four-time-kidney transplanted patient. Lucky and blessed me. Blessed? For sure! What else can you call striking it rich four times? Today I am, for all intents and purposes, healthy - deaths and floods, loss and heartache, infertility and relapses, career lows and other such failures notwithstanding. All of these have made that elusive HAPPY condition harder to come by! But I am working on it!
My husband loves me madly and that's a good start.
So that was my purpose - my raison d'être - in returning to the zoo this year. I had unfinished business there.
My aunt and cousins said that it looked pretty bad that dark July day in 1989, both in the ambulance and later at the hospital. They even worried I wouldn't make the whole flight back. They worried more when the medical personnel agreed with them. I was told my pressure was stubbornly resistant to the drugs prescribed. My swelling (face, arms, legs and feet) was getting more dangerous with every passing moment. My toxic build-up was terrifying even to those seasoned doctors. People with my numbers just didn't take plane rides well, let alone go untreated safely. By the time we landed, I was nearly unrecognizable, even to my parents, who would have been hard pressed to pick me out of a line-up.
In the end, what I wanted was simple.
I wanted to go back to San Diego, not so much to see what I failed to see of the zoo back in 1989. I wanted to go back for that kind EMT who looked so worried, while she watched the IV drip into my body. I wanted to go back for her wonderful young partner who seemed appalled by my pressure, at my tender age. I wanted to go back for the doctors who treated me in the emergency room and the ones who shook their heads dismayed. The ones who ran around to work on me. The ones who decided it was best I go home. The ones who did what they could to keep me alive, until I could be helped here.
I wanted to go back to fix the memories, which I allowed myself to corrode with only the bad things. I purposely left out of the memories the days in 1989 when we went to Sea World and Universal Studios without any drama . I left out my first encounter in La Jolla's majestic coves. Places I went back to this month because I wanted to experience them feeling as great as I do now.
Truly, I wanted to go back because for a long, long time I remained angry at myself for something that was completely out of my control: Being sick. I needed the resolution of forgiveness, even if it didn't come by the old fashioned way at church. I needed this zoo, where I once almost lost my life, to become the church for my poisoned mind.
I wanted to go back for anyone who ever doubted that I would survive in 1989. I wanted to walk to that same cage where new monkeys reside, but this time, I wanted to keep going...
And I did.
(*PHOTOS: 1 -Statue of "Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus" outside Our Lady of the Sea Church in La Jolla, CA. Veronica is my Confirmation name, so I had to think this was a sign!
2- Entrance to the famed San Diego Zoo. 3- Joe and me by the one ride we took at the Zoo.
4 -Me outside Seaport Village in San Diego County, July 2010)
Comments