Category: Personal

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Changing the NSCDA

When my grandmother had me proposed for membership in the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) in the mid-1990s, I understood that I needed to choose one of my many notorious colonial American ancestors to qualify. My great-grandmother, grandmother, grand-aunts, mother, and mother’s first cousins had all joined through different colonial ancestors. I was already familiar with the well-researched family chart my grandmother had given my mother, which had inspired me to embark on my genealogical quest years before. By my count, I had eighteen colonial-era men listed in the NSCDA’s Register of Ancestors (ROA), and at least another ten of my male colonial ancestors met the Dames qualifications but did not yet appear on the ROA.

To my great and lasting disappointment, however, the direct ancestor I admired the most, whose influence over colonial neighbors and society was significant and reached into the two earliest New England colonies and then beyond, did not appear on the list.

She was a woman.

The NSCDA’s requirements for qualifying ancestors specified that an ancestor had to have given some significant public service to their colony, and the categories were almost exclusively limited to military service, public office holders, founders of significant colonial towns, and religious leaders. They were male, practically without exception, because only males could serve in those formal capacities, and only the signatures of the men appeared on public documents proving such service. The names of women rarely appeared in public records. It especially jarred me to realize that these men who qualified based on founding significant towns such as Providence, Rhode Island, were almost always married, but their wives were never listed as founders.

One of the female exceptions to the NSCDA’s Boys Club was my favorite ancestor’s sister, Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne was notorious for being prosecuted and then exiled from Boston in the winter of 1638 for having the audacity to preach to the women of Boston and even (gasp!) challenge the positions of several respected local preachers. She and Mary Dyer, another outspoken preacher, appeared on Massachusetts’s list of accepted ancestors. Anne’s sister and Mary’s friend, Katherine Marbury Scott, who moved to Providence Plantations when Anne was tried for heresy, did not appear in the ROA.

I asked about adding Katherine to the list. I’d happily prove her preaching, notoriety, and challenge to Massachusetts Governor John Endecott. I don’t recall if I only approached the Arkansas Registrar or communicated with the Rhode Island Registrar or genealogist about her. Ultimately, I was told to pick someone else. I was told that unlike Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, Katherine didn’t famously preach, nor was she arrested, tried, or punished for her religious objections.

But she did, and she was!

To the dismay of Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop – the man who acted as her sister’s accuser, judge, jury, and executioner – Katherine influenced Roger Williams, the famous Anabaptist preacher who was the first colonial advocate for the separation of church and state. At least partly due to her influence, Williams agreed that infant baptism was inappropriate and broke from the Puritans of Massachusetts.1Winthrop, John, The History of New England from 1630-1649, Hosmer, ed., p. 297, available at https://archive.org/details/winthropsjournal00wint.

Katherine and her husband were the first known Quakers in the American colonies and spread the Quaker philosophy and practice among the populace. In her late 40s, she was imprisoned, stripped to the waist in public, suffered ten cruel lashes from a knotted whip, and threatened with hanging if she didn’t keep her mouth shut from here on out. Two of her young daughters – one only 11 years old – went to prison with her. Katherine’s crime was objecting to the mutilation of Quakers. The older imprisoned daughter later married one of the mutilated Quaker men in England.

But somehow, this wouldn’t count? Katherine – and her daughters Patience and Mary – should qualify as NSCDA ancestors because of their overt advocacy of religious freedom.

Americans universally claim religious freedom as one of the founding principles of our country. The Protestant Reformation was in full swing when religious separatists boarded the Mayflower in 1620, joined the Winthrop fleet in 1630, fled to William Penn’s Quaker utopia in the 1690s, and embraced the Great Awakening in the 1730s.

In fits and starts, and despite theocratic local governments in the New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies and parish control of government functions in Virginia and Carolina, notions of religious freedom spread and permeated all of colonial America. George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that reason and conviction should direct a person’s religion, not force or violence. The first item in the Bill of Rights appended to the United States Constitution includes the free exercise of religion and the freedom from government interference in religion. In 1789, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man – heavily influenced by American ideals – maintained that “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views.”

On top of all of this, the NSCDA limited its membership to women but excluded nearly every colonial woman from their list of qualifying ancestors. Why? Did its governing leaders honestly think their entire gender had so little to offer in the colonial era? Did they not understand that no colony could succeed without women? The founders of Jamestown certainly came to understand that in short order. Even so, the NSCDA’s Register of Ancestors included very few of Jamestown’s early women. Those it did include had to be wealthy, powerful, and independent – something legally impossible under coverture laws except in extremely limited circumstances.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of this group.

In passive-aggressive protest, I let my application linger for several years. Genealogy was my hobby and passion, and I could have chosen any of the ancestors my relatives had already proven. The injustice of not accepting Katherine rankled me.

My grandmother insisted I join, and my mother badgered me to complete my application. Neither could understand why I didn’t pick someone already on the list and get the paperwork done. After all, genealogical research was my passion, and I could copy any of the applications of my many Dames relatives in short order. It wasn’t that big a deal, was it?

Yes, damn it, it was.

Bowing to their pressure, I finally decided to join based on Katherine’s husband’s recognized service. He was wealthy and influential but didn’t impress me nearly as much as she did. He seemed a solid, principled man, sure. Still, he only embodied the usual among my colonial ancestors: he was an educated landowner who bravely went to a new place to start a new life and took part in the political affairs of his community. Beyond that, he did not spark my imagination.

Two or three years ago, the NSCDA had a change of heart. At a national level, it decided to push to include more women in the Register of Ancestors. It set a goal of having 250 females included on the ROA by the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The individual colonial states set the guidelines for ancestor qualifications, though, and other than Virginia, the colonial societies seemed reluctant to widen the qualifying “service” women might have legally been able to give. Foot-dragging stymied this otherwise attainable goal.

Rhode Island, where Katherine Marbury Scott lived, finally expanded their qualifications in 2024. (I’ve been watching for it.) Other colonial states are just as slow, if not slower. For example, Eliza Lucas Pinckney still doesn’t appear on South Carolina’s list of acceptable women despite her herculean accomplishments in cultivating indigo and refining the process of extracting its dye. Because of her singular efforts, indigo became one of her colony’s three staple exports in the 18th century. Massachusetts finally expanded its list of qualifications so applicants for membership could claim Women of Distinction. The first colonial American poet, Anne Bradstreet, finally counts.

The blatant misogyny and snobbery of the organization still flabbergasts me. Are the NSCDA’s colonial societies afraid that if they expand the qualifications to include women, men who did the same important things – men of science and letters, for example – might suddenly qualify, and the “wrong sorts” will pollute the Register of Ancestors?

I have a few men of science and letters in my tree who I’d like to include, like Dr. Benjamin West of Providence, Rhode Island, a prominent man of both science and letters who never held public office, never preached, never served as an officer in the military, and wasn’t wealthy enough to join the board of organizers of what is now Brown University.

I want to claim John Perkins, who, as a youth, led the important Moravian expedition that ultimately resulted in the founding of Salem, North Carolina. He was the son of a horse thief and a notorious adulteress but became prosperous, prominent, and one of the largest landowners in 18th Century Western Carolina. Without a doubt, he represents the wrong sort for the Colonial Dames. Never mind that the murderer John Billington qualifies because he came on the Mayflower or that his fellow Mayflower passengers Edward Doty, Stephen Hopkins, William Latham, and Richard More also built impressive rap sheets in colonial America.

The Dames’ snob factor is real. Several larger southern state societies of the NSCDA actively refuse admission to genealogically qualified women, including the legacies of their current members. While such selectivity and elitism may appeal to some, it’s appalling to others. The NSCDA is a lineage society, not an exclusive country club.

Am I complicit in this snobbery and misogyny? I have been a member of the NSCDA for over two decades. I have served on the Arkansas Society’s board since 2005 and have been its Registrar or Assistant Registrar since 2013. As Registrar, I process the applications of candidates for membership. I do most of the genealogy research for our candidates myself. I am intimately familiar with the policies for qualifying ancestors. I am also intimately familiar with the snobbery.

At a Regional meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, I sat at a table with a member from Memphis. The evening’s entertainment was an actor portraying Thomas Jefferson. A notorious DNA project had recently confirmed Thomas Jefferson to be the father of Sally Hemings’s enslaved children. I remarked to my dinner companion that because of DNA technology, it would be much easier for Black women to join the NSCDA. To my knowledge, there were no Black Dames at that time.

She gave me a look of abject horror. Apparently realizing that she shouldn’t be racist, she said that such people couldn’t join because they couldn’t prove legitimate descent from the qualifying ancestor. I laughed and told her that DNA proves actual descent, and the NSCDA has never required legitimacy. Her reaction to that news made me think she was about to have a fit of apoplexy.

For years, in the password-protected section of the NSCDA website, a letter from a prominent early Dame, Clarinda Pendleton Lamar, was posted as an example of who to invite to join the Dames. Clarinda Lamar cautioned proposers to consider whether the candidate for the NSCDA was a credit to her race, her ancestors, and her community. During my first term as Arkansas Registrar, the NSCDA’s national president visited us and was present for a board meeting. At the time, two existing members had to write proposal letters to suggest a candidate for Dames membership. They had to know the candidate well and vouch for her. Our bylaws required us to read the proposal letters aloud during two separate board meetings, after which the board would vote on whether to invite the proposed candidate to apply for membership in the NSCDA. To the best of my knowledge, Arkansas has never rejected a proposal.

When we got to the proposal-reading portion of the agenda, the national president suggested reading Clarinda Lamar’s letter aloud to remind us what qualities we should look for in a candidate. After reading the “credit to her race” line, I stopped. “Well, that’s awful,” I said. Nervous laughter went around the table.

I advocated removing the Lamar letter from the website at subsequent national conferences in Washington, D.C. While most of Clarinda Lamar’s contributions to society were significant and good, that letter represented the worst of what we can be. It was patently unsuitable as the lodestar of membership. At one meeting of all the Registrars nationally, around 2016 or 2018, I repeated my request to remove it. On receiving pushback, I lifted my middle finger prominently skyward. I declared that Clarinda Lamar’s racism did not speak for me or the Arkansas Society and that having the letter there was an embarrassment. She was a product of her time, yes, but just like we stopped ignoring when people in positions of power demanded sex from their subordinates – and I specifically mentioned Thomas Jefferson and casting couches – we needed to stop ignoring racism because by ignoring it, we promoted it.

There was a general outcry, but after the meeting, several Registrars approached me privately and thanked me for pointing that out. A couple of others later admitted they had never read the letter until my words prompted them to do so, and they agreed that it should be taken down. In 2024, the National Society overhauled the website. The Lamar letter no longer enjoys publication there. Nevertheless, my beloved friend and successor Arkansas Registrar has never let me live down “the day [I] flipped off Mrs. Lamar” in front of 50 devoted Colonial Dames.

In October 2016, at another National meeting in Washington DC, I found myself seated between my counterpart in Vermont, who I liked very much and remain in contact with, and a woman from Arizona. Barack Obama was about to leave the Oval Office, and Donald Trump, the primary denier of Obama’s American citizenship, wanted his job. This Arizona woman bragging about her close personal friends the Koch brothers, stuck in my craw. I turned to my Vermont friend and suggested we ask the DC Dames if they’d reach out to the Obama sisters to ask if they’d like to join our lineage society. After all, they qualified through their father’s ancestors. I would be happy to do the genealogy research, and getting our hands on their father’s birth certificate, which would be necessary to prove their colonial lineage, was a matter of public consumption at this point. The Obama girls also had a half-Indonesian aunt who qualified because of the same lineage. We would finally integrate the Dames!

We did approach the DC Dames’ Registrar about it, but nothing ever happened. I remain ready, willing, and able to compile the applications for the Obama sisters and their paternal aunt.

I have taken other steps to make changes from within this organization. I have completed applications for NSCDA membership for women whose home societies would not let them join, and then I’ve processed transfers to their home societies. The National Society requires that transfers be automatically approved. Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas have all benefitted from my end-run around their blackballing town committees. I will do it again whenever I can. I can’t abide the snobbery.

Change comes from within. I can do more to challenge the Colonial Dames’ culture of elitism and snobbery as a member than I can by refusing to participate and letting it go on. I can advocate for change, I can take steps to rectify wrongs, and I can, incrementally, make it better. I do not support racism or snobbery any more than Katherine Marbury Scott supported religious oppression.

Footnotes

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Disturbing Dream

I deactivated my X/Twitter account (aka, Xitter), and the next night, I had a dream.

See, I have this nifty electric car that is not a Tesla but looks like one. My car and I were on a road trip. One of our regular overnight stops was a cave in a desert. I pulled into the cave, which I expected to be deserted, and was surprised to see a tractor parked inside. There was nothing remarkable about this tractor. It was an ordinary John Deere sort of small-ish tractor like those we often see on country roads in Arkansas during the farming season.

Curious, I walked around the tractor. Parked on the other side of it was a miniature Cybertruck. It was smaller than one of those little Datsun pickups from the 1970s but not as small as a Barbie Dream Car. Its windows had steel shades on the outside. It looked like a toy but functional. I took a picture but couldn’t get a signal to text it to [whomever]. I left the cave to get a signal to send the text.

Focused on my phone, I was startled when Diane Munzer Fisher tapped me on the shoulder. “Oh, hey,” I said. “You found me. There’s a tiny Cybertruck in the cave.” (I do not know why Diane would have been looking for me. We only ever see each other at college reunions and on social media.)

“Don’t steal it,” a male voice said. Diane and I turned to see a young man lying near the cave entrance, sacked out in a sleeping bag. We had not noticed him before, but he was only a couple of feet away. He reached out and grabbed my leg.

“Why would we steal a Cybertruck?” Diane asked, disdain dripping from her pores. No kidding, I thought, and shook my leg free.

The young man was blond, with a broad face. He looked like a blond Elon Musk. “It’s MY truck,” he said. “My dad gave it to me.”

Diane and I entered the cave. The young man followed us. We realized he was very young – in his middle teens at most. “My name is Wilder Musk,” he said.

The cave’s walls were now sheetrocked, and posters of Tesla and SpaceX employees papered the brightly lit interior.

“Wilder, huh?” Diane asked. She pointed to a poster featuring a woman. “As in, Elaine Wilder, the Chief of Technology and Development?”

“That’s my mom,” young Wilder said.

We realized that Elon had yet another child to add to the dozen or so the media knows about already. The man spreads his seed far and wide indeed.

I noticed a hair tickling my palate and put two fingers into my mouth to pull it out. It stuck on something in my throat. I started gagging and coughing.

“Let me help,” Diane said. After some wrestling and much more coughing and gagging, she pulled a gross, tangled wad of hair out. (Yuck.)

The apparent moral of the story [dream] is that Cybertrucks and the proliferation of Elon Musk cause hairballs.

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Death and Cats

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I was 29 the first time I should have died. A century ago, childbirth killed more women than any other single cause. Broadly speaking, childbed death ranked third behind all infectious diseases and all chronic diseases but ahead of injury. Not only would I have died before modern medicine, but my baby would have. My pelvis wasn’t wide enough to allow him through. He was three weeks late and weighed more than eight and a half pounds, and I was in labor and fully dilated for several hours when the baby went into what they called “distress.” I know it’s medical jargon, but I can’t help but wonder what isn’t distressing about the birth process.

Caesarians weren’t done very often until the mid-20th century. In ancient Rome, India, and China, fetuses were cut from the wombs of dead or dying women in hopes that the child would survive. More than a millennium later, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and a Persian epic poem separately recorded that babies were sometimes delivered surgically, but doing so was rare and survival of the mother even rarer. If she did live, she would have no more children. In 1500, a Swiss veterinarian named Jacob Nufer claimed to have performed a successful caesarian on his wife. She allegedly delivered five more children naturally.

Once sterilization and handwashing became more commonplace, surgeons refined the procedure, and more women survived. With the 20th-century discovery of antibiotics to combat infections, caesareans happened more often. By 1991, they were routine. Thank you, modern medicine, for saving two lives with my first abdominal surgery. Modern antibiotics also cured both of us of the staph infections we contracted during the birth experience.

Of course, had it not been for modern medicine, I wouldn’t have been pregnant in the first place, so there’s that.

I was 32 the second time I should have died. My doctor explained what carcinoma in situ meant, and I came out of my second abdominal surgery without a cervix or most of the rest of my reproductive organs. The “in situ” covered a more extensive area than my doctor initially thought. Cancerous cells in my uterus and cysts encrusting my ovaries spelled doom for them, although the doctor scraped the cysts off my left ovary and left it in place so as not to trigger early menopause. Years later, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and was grateful for her unwitting contribution in the 1950s to my survival in 1994.

At 38, I should have died again. At a regular visit for migraine management, my neurologist asked if anyone had ever told me I had a freckle in my eye. A few months later, my optometrist asked if, beyond my usual myopia, I was having trouble seeing. I told him no but mentioned my neurologist’s comment. He picked up the phone in the examination room, called an ophthalmologist friend, and said I needed an appointment immediately, preferably that day. Three hours later, that ophthalmologist told me I would lose my eye and that we could only hope the tumor had not spread into my brain.

I was still traumatized by the first cancer diagnosis. The second utterly froze me. My sister sprang into action and found that the University of Tennessee hoped to pioneer an experimental laser surgery to excise choroidal melanomas. I was the first patient in its new program. Today, I have a blind spot and a lot of floaters, but I still have a functional right eye and the satisfaction of knowing I survived a rare cancer relatively unscathed.

My paternal grandmother, whom everyone said I strongly resembled, died at 39, three months after being diagnosed with leukemia. Medicine came a long way between 1952 and the 1980s when her brother was diagnosed with the same disease. He lived to die of something else years later. Nevertheless, when I passed my 40th birthday, I sighed with relief to still be breathing.

I might have died again at 50, but I definitely would have at 52. My first bout of diverticulitis, which felled me at my nephew’s high school graduation, resolved after a brief hospital stay and a hefty dose of antibiotics. A year later, the second episode perforated my bowel. I failed outpatient antibiotic treatment and ended up back in the emergency room. After another hospital stay, another dose of hefty antibiotics, and yet another hospital admission, I underwent my third life-saving abdominal surgery. Four days later, the spot where the surgeon reconnected the healthy parts of my bowel failed. Partially digested food seeped into my abdominal cavity. I remember screaming, screaming incoherently with the intense, burning pain, and nurses trying to restrain me.

Peritonitis, which inevitably causes sepsis within 24-48 hours, killed all its victims before modern surgical techniques and antibiotics. It killed my 24-year-old great-grand-aunt Kate Reinhardt a month after her 1902 wedding. Had I not still been in the hospital, it would have killed me in March 2014.

A week later, I woke up in the ICU after my fourth life-saving abdominal surgery. The surgeon had split my abdomen in a jagged line from the old caesarian scar to a point several inches north of my belly button. I did not leave the hospital for five weeks.

The surgeon had not stitched or stapled me back together. I had to heal “from the inside out.” In addition to a colostomy bag, I had a wound vac. My surgeon told me he didn’t know whether I had enough of a colon left to reverse the colostomy. Regardless, I would not be strong enough to survive another surgery for months.

Several weeks later, my son and I walked around our neighborhood as I tried to build strength. As we climbed Oak Street toward Hill Road, I felt something pop in my abdomen just above the bag that hung from my left side. I made an appointment to see my surgeon. Despite what was evident to me, he seemed mystified that I suspected the soft protrusion from that spot might be a hernia. Yes, I had a stoma and a still-unhealed surgical incision running most of the length of my torso, but surely the integrity of my abdominal wall had not been breached. He shrugged, pronounced me mistaken, and sent me home.

I resent gaslighting. There was no way I would allow that jackass to cut into me again. I found a different surgeon to reverse the colostomy. He assured me he would repair the hernia at the same time. I was relieved to wake up from my fifth abdominal surgery without a bag. I was disappointed that the surgeon had neglected to repair the hernia, which protruded from my belly like a cantaloupe when I stood. When I asked why, he shrugged. Doctors seem to enjoy shrugging.

I hired a personal trainer. I worked to regain core strength. Another enormous hernia popped out from the lower right side of my abdomen. Eventually, it grew to the size of a honeydew. I asked my doctor about surgery to repair them both. I was uncomfortable and limited in movement because “melons” clung to my midsection. The last thing I wanted was another abdominal surgery, but this was ridiculous. “Lose weight,” my doctor told me, and shrugged. Oddly, I could find no evidence to support weight loss as a cure for hernias. Perhaps my Google-fu was insufficient for the task.

Two years later, my gallbladder had to come out. The surgery typically takes about half an hour. Because of the extensive scarring and adhesions from the third, fourth, and fifth abdominal surgeries, my sixth abdominal surgery took over three hours.

I’ve lost weight, although I still have virtually no core strength because of these impeding hernias. I haven’t tried to die recently, and I’ve been cancer-free for over 20 years. Plus, I have a new doctor who doesn’t gaslight or fat-shame me. Last week, she ordered a CT scan of my abdomen to pave the way for a referral to a surgeon to repair three hernias – I added a third one last summer. Yesterday morning, she called me with the scan results.

I’m not going to be able to have the hernias repaired yet. First, a gynecological oncologist will have to remove the three-inch tumor the scan discovered on my remaining ovary. I wish I had endured early menopause instead, but hindsight and all that.

I’m glad I got the scan. Otherwise, it might have been too late before I learned that I had unlocked the cancer trifecta achievement and that I needed that seventh abdominal surgery to save my life for the fifth (or is it the sixth?) time.

“Good thing you’re a cat person,” my sister told me earlier this year. “You need to borrow all their extra lives.”

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Worthy of Plants and Society

I confess that yesterday did not go as expected.

I got a text about 1:30 yesterday afternoon from my friend Sarah.  Sarah and I serve on a couple of nonprofit boards together. We get stuff done. She said she needed to ask me something in person. Since she never, ever does that, my heart just about pounded out of my chest.

My mind was racing. Had I said something inappropriate to someone? Had I screwed something up? Was I about to get bad news? Holy shit, what was it? I wanted to vomit.  My heart was beating in my throat. I couldn’t think of anyone I might have offended recently. I couldn’t think of any projects that I’d flaked out on. I needed a Xanax. My eyelid was twitching.

Not Worthy
My Inferiority Complex

Sarah rang my doorbell about 20 minutes later. She wasn’t alone. I could have sworn that I heard my sister’s voice before I opened the door. That was just craptastic. The last thing I wanted was for my sister to be here if Sarah had something awful to talk with me about. I mean, Mom has proof that my younger sister’s smarter than I am = we had IQ testing done when we went to boarding school 40 years ago, so it must be true – and that fact just feeds megadoses of Little Shop of Horrors-level superfood to my inferiority complex. I really didn’t want to be humiliated in front of her….stop it, Anne. Jesus!…I opened the door.

Sarah was there. Susan was there. And so was my mom. Fuck. Sarah was holding a big flower arrangement. What was THAT all about? I wanted to get rid of Mom and Susan so Sarah could talk to me about whatever it was she had texted me about. But before I could even say “come in,” all three of them shouted, in unison, “CONGRATULATIONS!”

Garden Club flowersSarah handed me the flower arrangement. “You’ve just been elected to the Little Rock Garden Club,” she said.

 

Holy mother of meatballs and spaghetti sauce.

 

This garden club is pretty hard to get into. Like, you can’t get into it if you ask. You can’t buy your way in. There are only 70 active members, all of them female. My great-grandmother was in that club, as was my grandmother. My mom and sister are both in the club.

I don’t have a lot of friends in common with them. See, I’ve spent most of my adult life in offices and courtrooms and working long hours. I didn’t have time for book clubs, golf or tennis, coffee klatches, lunching with ladies, or dinners with friends. Even now that I’m not working anymore, I spend long hours in front of my computer and I rarely go out. When I do, it’s usually with my heathen friends, who tend to be focused on other things. I mean, I just don’t run in the same circles as these ladies. I never expected to be invited to join their club.

To get into the Little Rock Garden Club, someone unrelated to you who knows you well has to nominate you without your knowledge, then someone ELSE has to second the nomination, then a secret committee gets a chance to blackball you. And then the whole board gets a shot at saying no.

It seems that the board said yes. It seems that I did not get blackballed in committee. Apparently Sarah nominated me and another friend seconded the nomination.

I have officially arrived in society. Me. The activist. The outspoken freethinker. The agitator. The socialist. The foul-mouthed, overweight, loud, obnoxious, ultra-liberal, Charlie Brown-hating, rabble-rousing…me. I suddenly had tears in my eyes. Dear sweet baby Cthulhu, where did this gift come from?!

I know nobody gives a rat’s ass, and I know that I shouldn’t give one either, but I have felt my whole adult life that I am unworthy of being around “nice” people like the members of this club. For the last two days, my phone has been ringing with congratulations from the people I know in the club. I had no idea I knew so many of them! Maybe I do belong there after all. Maybe this will help heal my imposter syndrome, just a little.

Today, I am suddenly worthy.

I intend to enjoy the hell out of this.

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The Truth Behind My English Degree

Fraternity parties, reading and writing. College didn’t consist of much else.

Oh, there were variations on the theme, of course. Maybe instead of Fraternity Row, we headed downtown to one of the bars. Maybe a study group got together to discuss the assignment at the on-campus pub.

I started out in political science. When a Canadian foreign policy professor insulted me in class for being “stupidly southern” – my accent had not yet flattened into the nondescript sound it would have by the end of my college career – I switched to philosophy. Weed and philosophy just seemed to go together, and as a college freshman, I liked weed. The term papers, fortunately, came easily.

Too much of philosophy dealt with religion, though. Kant bored me. Kierkegaard had some good points, but his conclusions disgusted me. Don’t even get me started on Nietzsche and the nihilists. It became hemlock to me. Me, who preferred whisky sours. I felt like a hack pulling an all-nighter to spew existentialist nonsense through my typewriter onto onionskin paper.

At a party at the Beta house just before fall class selections were due, an interesting guy I had just met talked about his passion for history. We drank a hell of a lot of beer that night, and, still hung over on Monday, I signed up for a history major.

History is where all the best stories were, right? Battles, intrigue, betrayal, love stories, revenge, swords, longbows: history had them all. I had a great professor who liked to host parties at his home for his favorite students. We’d go and talk about more history. But why did all of these cultures clash? Over cheese dip and home-made hard cider, the conversations I liked best were the ones that talked about motivation, not just the cold facts.

One spring evening at the history professor’s house, his buddy from the Sociology Department showed up wearing a t-shirt from Belize. Belize had just become independent from Great Britain. (Yeah – now you can tell how long ago this happened.) He spoke passionately about imperialism and colonialism, and I was hooked on a new discipline. I also discovered that Long Island iced teas oiled conversation really, really well.

The next semester, I signed up for every class the Belize guy taught, and I adored his Welsh accent. Anthropology and Sociology ripped my attention away from the details of medieval European wars. Cultural annihilation and tribalism made for much more fertile ground for delving into the mysteries of what motivates people.

Campus was a microcosm of colonialism, tribalism, and cultural annihilation. Some of us resisted the allure to joining Greek tribes; others of us embraced them. None of us would leave the same people we were when we arrived. Intramural rivalries made for every party on the Row outdoing the last. Theta Chi was a very different tribe from Sigma Chi, despite sharing the same last name.

It wasn’t until the spring of my junior year, when I realized that I was writing the same paper for a sociology class that I had written for every other sociology class I had ever taken that I decided I’d had enough. Two days before the end of the drop-add period, I dumped that sociology class and changed my major to English. It was the only major I knew I could complete in two semesters. I still adored that professor with the Welsh accent, though.

I graduated on time, even getting a class in nothing but Kurt Vonnegut novels to count toward my new major. I cranked out papers faster than ever. I soared on the written page. And now when I hung out with the guys at the Fiji House (may it rest in peace), I could talk about any subject under the sun. I had, it seemed, even if only briefly, majored in them all.

On a brilliantly sunny day in May 1984, I got my sheepskin. I had my Bachelor of Arts degree. It claimed to be a B.A. in English, but I knew better. My B.A. in English was actually a B.A. in B.S.

Ah, the humanities of it all.

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Migraine: Chapter 57 (and counting)

Pardon me while I bitch. This is not a political rant. This has nothing to do with social justice or a better word for humanity. This rant is all about me me me. So, if you aren’t interested in the self-absorbed ravings of a cranky middle-aged white woman, this post is not for you. Frankly, I can’t imagine that anyone would be interested, but it’s cathartic to write it out, so here goes:

I am sick of waking up every morning with a migraine. Today is day 57. Consecutive day 57 with no break. Every day between 4 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. I wake with a pounding skull.

Sure, the drugs usually knock it out, but it takes at least an hour for them to work – if they work – and they work best if I go back to sleep for at least 30 minutes while they’re taking effect. Since I can’t go to sleep on command, especially with a jackhammer or icepick working my skull, it’s not like I can set an alarm – half the time I wake up two hours later. This is really cutting into my day and what little productivity I can actually eke out between browsing Reddit and clicking links on Facebook. (Which, of course, are the prime reasons to get out of bed to begin with, right? Except I have a laptop and an iPad, not to mention a phone, so I could do that from under the covers…)

I have a job – although I’m self-employed because who would hire someone with more sick days than good days? I volunteer. I have clients and people and organizations I’ve made commitments to, and it’s getting harder and harder to meet those commitments. I only take cases without crushing deadlines.

I make those commitments because I care passionately about the world I live in, and I want to make it better. That’s why I became a lawyer to begin with – to help improve the world. It’s why I volunteer with some of the organizations I volunteer with. (I volunteer with the others just because I love history.)

Some days I can’t get out of bed. Some days I have to stay under the covers in a dark room with my handy barf bowl within reach. Sometimes I have multiple days in a row like that.

Life with Migraine

I’ve had migraines all my life. I was diagnosed in fourth grade when my mother and teacher became concerned. My vision faded and blurred during class when I had tremendous, pounding headaches. The really bad headaches came only occasionally,  usually just three or four times a year. I had smaller ones frequently, though. The pace of my most severe headaches increased as I got older. I’d have bad ones as often as six or eight times a year throughout the decade of my 20s. I had a small sofa in my office so that when they hit, I could take a nap until the painkillers worked. Back then, there were no such things as triptans, and I didn’t want to go home if I could possibly remain functional. I had too much to do. Over-the-counter medications had virtually no impact. I tried them all. The only things that got rid of the worst headaches were narcotics, sleep, and time.

Three or four times a year, only time cured them. I would spend two or three days in blinding pain, vomit uncontrollably, and long for something as soft as it was cool. My pillow was too hard. Rolling over in bed meant torpedoes homed in on my cranium, unleashing their fury. But these bad headaches only happened three or four times a year. They were definitely inconvenient, but I could deal with them.

The Tipping Point

In 1997 I was in an auto accident that resulted in severe whiplash. Within a year, I was having severe headaches weekly. Then the time between headaches narrowed to the point that I would have only three or four days between attacks. The attacks themselves lasted two or three days.

I had a client who was a doctor. “Is this stress-related?” I asked him one day. “Probably,” he answered, and wrote me a prescription for a tranquilizer. It didn’t help, except to help me sleep when the headaches came.

I went to a clinic that specialized in headaches. “Live with it,” the neurologist there told me. “There’s nothing we can do but manage the pain, and we’ll do that without painkilling narcotics.”

How do you “manage” pain if there’s no way to treat the underlying cause and painkillers aren’t an option? I didn’t go back.

When one migraine had already lasted for two days and I couldn’t stop throwing up, my husband took me to my regular doctor. They gave me shot of Imitrex. It didn’t work. “It’s not a migraine if Imitrex doesn’t work,” I was told. It was bad information, but that was typical of what I had already encountered. Even the doctors had no clue.

Finally, a friend of my sister’s who worked in the ER of a teaching university got me in to see one of the top neurologists at the medical school. I met Lee Archer. He is not just my doctor; over the last 15 years, he has become my friend.

The first thing he did was prescribe Imitrex. I told him about the time I was given a shot of it that didn’t work. He shrugged. “If you wait too long, and if the headache is too far progressed, you really do have to ride it out,” he told me. “Take the pills when you sense the aura, or, if there’s no aura, as soon as you feel it coming on.”

Imitrex is a miracle drug.

I don’t mean “miracle” in the sense that it has supernatural, non-understandable properties. I mean that it really does stop a migraine in its tracks, and it does so without significant side effects. Imitrex gave me a semblance of a life back. That, to me, is miraculous. I don’t know who stumbled upon the formula for Imitrex, or who found that it worked for migraines, but they are a hero.

But the headaches still came too often – I was limited by insurance to nine of these precious doses a month. Since some headaches required two doses, we had to find some way to prevent them from happening as frequently.

I’ve tried every prophylactic out there over the last 15 years, from beta-blockers to botox to butterbur. (That’s just some stuff I’ve tried that starts with B. I’ve been through the rest of the alphabet, too, including A, which included acupuncture, which … don’t even ask. Yes, I am desperate enough to try powdered horn of tiger testicle at this point if some witch doctor hints to me that it might work.)

Add to that, I saw a Huffington Post report a couple of days ago that included an appearance by the mother of Melissa Dwyer, a 22-year-old with daily migraines who finally killed herself this past summer because she could get no relief from any medications anymore. At 22, her life was effectively over, so she ended it. I understand it, but I don’t have to like it.

When the last of the meds stop working, I won’t have any desire to continue living in constant debilitating pain, either. What will be the point? I will be of no use to anyone, and I will have no quality of life. Already I can’t take care of myself when the headaches are bad. I don’t know that I could get out of a burning house, or even dial 911 and coherently ask for help. My migraines are often accompanied by transient aphasia. Yes. Me. A woman who talks and writes and wields words for her vocation and her avocation has aphasia. The worse the headache, the worse the aphasia.

I long ago passed the tipping point. Since 1997 I have had more migraine days than pain-free days. That’s 16 years.

When I don’t feel well, I get cranky. I avoid people because I know how miserable it is to be around me. Just ask Jane. She was my paralegal for more than 15 years, and she’s still my best friend. She has seen me deteriorate over the last (almost) 20 years. She’s seen me fall into a deep depression and she’s been there to cover my ass and to prop me up when things have been worst. No one else has ever done for me what she has – not anyone in my family and not any other friends. Now that we aren’t working together I miss her tremendously. Without her, I’ll be dead, and the cats will have picked my bones clean a month before anyone discovers my body.

Plus, I’m an organ donor, dammit; suicide’s just not an option under these circumstances.

Prior to finding my current neurologist in the late 1990s, relief only came from narcotics and Phenergan, both of which are still in my diminishing chemical arsenal – diminishing, because after a while, drugs just stop working and for some insane reason doctors just won’t increase the dosage to toxic or lethal levels.  (I know. I don’t understand, either. If Westley could develop an immunity to iocane powder, then surely by now I am immune to poppies.) The neurologists before my present one told me I’d just have to live with the headaches and good luck with that.

There is nothing worse than a doctor giving up on you – and telling you to give up, too.

Lawyering with Migraines

I’ve quit practicing law twice, the first time in 2001. The headaches were awful then, but I had enough of a financial cushion that when Jane’s son was born we decided to scale back the law practice and work from home, only taking the cases we really wanted. That was a good decision, but significant necessary cost overruns on a home remodel coupled with the financial crisis in 2008 torpedoed my portfolio. I no longer had a choice, so I went back to work full-time.

I quickly realized I wasn’t up for extended litigation or stressful cases. Despite that, the following year I foolishly created a law firm with two other lawyers. By the fall of 2010, I had to completely stop going to court on contested cases. I couldn’t – and still can’t – reliably know if I’ll be able to function well enough to advocate for a client, and the anxiety over being able to function is as debilitating as the migraines themselves. I didn’t tell my law partners. I was afraid to. I just got our associate to go to court with or for me when I couldn’t settle a case to a client’s satisfaction. I called it “training.”

Did I mention that depression and anxiety are byproducts of chronic migraines? Depression is crippling. Anxiety is eviscerating. Of the two, my anxiety is far worse.

Here’s a fun fact: migraines exacerbate anxiety, which in turn exacerbates migraines. It’s a never-ending feedback loop that intensifies with each completed circuit, and at some point should equal and then exceed the electromagnetic strength of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, at which time I expect a black hole of misery to singularity itself into existence. Maybe a new boson will be discovered when the whole thing implodes. Let’s hope so, for science.

Here’s another fun fact: in the throes of a migraine, movement hurts. Every doctor I’ve ever been to tells me to exercise. Sometimes I can’t even turn my head without feeling the whole world ripple, and they want me to exercise. I tried. I paid a personal trainer for several years. Cardio workouts invariably gave me a headache. If I was using enough weight in resistance exercises to do me any good, the effort made the blood pound in my brain. I did it as long as I could, and finally, I gave up. Some days I can’t even walk up the stairs in my own house. It’s not my knees or my back that object – although they do. It’s my throbbing head. That much effort is just beyond me some days. Sometimes just walking across the room takes herculean effort.

Crisis

In the summer of 2011, things fell completely apart. There were damaging forces undermining me other than my deteriorating health, although I wouldn’t know that for another six months. I kept trying, like Sisyphus with that impossible boulder, not knowing that those other elements were working against me. I knew about the health issues and knew I was pushing that rock uphill. I just didn’t know that there was no way ever to get the rock to the top.

The feedback loop grew worse. I was working eighteen-hour days and accomplishing virtually nothing. I couldn’t sleep, because the lack of accomplishment made me extra anxious. I was at the office before 7 a.m. Except on nights when Socrates Cafe met, I didn’t leave until after 10 p.m. and often didn’t leave until after midnight. Even on weekends.

The lack of sleep showed in the quality of my work, and in my ability to work. I fell asleep during meetings. I fell asleep during telephone conversations at the office. I fell asleep mid-sentence, then would wake with a jerk. And the migraines just got worse. Instead of taking me off them, when I complained to my doctor that one of my six daily meds for migraine/depression/anxiety was contributing to the lack of sleep, he actually increased the dose. I stopped sleeping at all except for an hour or two a night when I would doze fitfully as I lay, frustrated at my inability to really sleep, in my bed. Night lasted forever, every single night.

Guess what happens when someone doesn’t sleep? Well, when a migraineur doesn’t sleep, her migraines get worse. I was giving myself shots of Imitrex at least once a week, and saving the shots for only the worst of the headaches. The worst came that often. And when anyone doesn’t sleep for a long enough period of time, she starts hallucinating. “Long enough” in this context was just a few weeks – at least, that’s when it finally dawned on me that shit was seriously fucked up.

My hallucinations weren’t the surreal technicolor movie we’ve been told happens with psychedelic drugs. They were subtle. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d see a shadow. It was a beaver-shaped shadow, maybe a nutria or groundhog. It sat on its hind legs and teased me from the periphery of my vision. I knew it wasn’t there, I knew it wasn’t real, but I kept seeing it. After a couple of weeks of this, it was joined by a crab-walking kind of prehistoric hominid figure.

The paleo-geek in me wanted nothing more than to get a really good look at this new creature. I knew it existed only as a result of sleep deprivation. I knew full well it wasn’t really there. Intellectually, I knew I was hallucinating. But the opportunity to observe an ancient hominid was about the coolest thing ever. Frustratingly, he stayed just in the corner of my vision, too, so I couldn’t get a good look at him. When I tried to look directly at any of these nutria or hominid-shaped shadows, they’d skate even further to the periphery, or they’d disappear entirely.

These critters never darted in front of me, they never stood where I could take a good, long look at them, and they were never more than shadows. This went on for about two months.

I finally gave up when things at work got so bad that I missed the third paycheck in a row. For about a year my paychecks had been spotty, and as a result, my finances were in a disastrous state. I had humbled myself to ask for help from my mother – at 49 I felt like a complete failure asking my mother for money. I was working 18-hour days, migraining almost constantly, not sleeping, seeing shadows that I knew weren’t there, and I couldn’t pay my mortgage. I was in a constant and frantic state of panic about money. And in early September 2011, the bottom officially fell out.

Without a bottom, there’s no limit to how far one can fall.

In early September 2011, I had my first panic attack. It was the first of many to come. Very few people knew that, and of those who did, none cared. They thought I was being silly. Heart palpitations, escalating circular thoughts spiraling upward in intensity, cold sweats, shortness of breath, and the inability to stop crying are not silly histrionics. No one chooses to experience these things, and no one wants to experience them in public. Certainly, I did not want to experience them in front of people who looked at me with narrowed eyes and a curtly dismissive attitude.

They told me to stop crying all the damn time. They wanted me to get over it, whatever “it” was.

I didn’t have these attacks because I wanted attention. I wanted anything but the attention they garnered me. I wanted to be able to interact normally. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to enjoy life. I wanted to enjoy my son’s company, revel in my nephew’s accomplishments, and interact with members of my family normally.

I wanted to stop crying all the damn time.

I would have if I could have.

Mental health crises are very poorly understood by most people in general. Someone having a “nervous breakdown” is scary to those who see it. It’s not nearly as scary to them as it is to the person experiencing it, though.

I went into an intensive therapy program. My family supported me going into therapy but had the impression that when the intense program was over, I’d be “fixed,” back to being the old me, and things would return to normal. They had absolutely no appreciation for how hard it was just to get up in the morning – not because I was depressed, but because I was sick.

Practicing law full-time was off the table, so I needed to create an entirely new career for myself out of thin air. And this new career, whatever it might be, had to provide me with enough income to be able to support myself while allowing me the luxury of having chronic, debilitating, disabling migraines more days than not. This crisis was a crisis of physical and mental health, sure, but there was a hell of a lot more to it.

For more than a month, the migraines grew measurably worse. I had to have shots of Imitrex every day for four solid weeks. I dropped everything: work, the activities I enjoyed, the friends I had, and even Socrates Cafe, which was by then the only thing I still did for pleasure.

I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I used to be competent, intelligent, organized, articulate, practical, strong, and forthright. A driving force. A hard worker. Diligent. Steadfast. Calm. I had never become part of any organization that didn’t then make me its leader. Sure, I procrastinated a lot, but I got stuff done. Now? Now I was a shell. I was fragile and tender. I couldn’t hold a thought in my head.

My family usually saw me in tears when they saw me at all, which was rarely. They were disgusted with me. They had absolutely no understanding of what was happening to me physically, fiscally, emotionally, or psychologically. They treated me like I was an addict who just needed to get my shit together. Tough love would take care of the problem I had become. In fact, they used the same methods and phrases on me that families of addicts are taught to use with their addicted loved ones. (There are addicts in my family, but I’m not one of them except when it comes to complex carbohydrates.)

Their criticism and their judgment and their lack of sympathy cut me to my core. They never asked how I was doing. They ignored me except when I had to reach out to them because I needed something from them I couldn’t get elsewhere.

I’ve always had social anxiety, but it was a lot worse during this period. They were completely clueless, and I knew of no way to clue them in. I doubt they even wanted to be clued in. As best I could tell, they believed they knew what was going on with me. I just needed more therapy. I just had to pull myself up by my bootstraps, after first designing the bootstraps and attaching them to my heels, of course.

When one has to put one’s face deep into quicksand to even figure out if there are bootstraps hidden somewhere down there to tug on, such an attitude from the people we need support from is hardly “supportive.” Furthermore, I didn’t need talk therapy. I needed practical solutions to very concrete problems, and I was fresh out of ideas. I needed a plan. I was expected to come up with it on my own, out of thin air. I couldn’t possibly do that, in the midst of a crisis and alone.

I had never worried much about other people’s opinions of me, but suddenly I was acutely aware:

I had been weighed. I had been measured. And I had been found wanting.

When the people I needed support from the most made it clear that they were not sympathetic, the impact hit me as forcefully as Ademar’s fist hit William’s gut.

I reached for someone, anyone, who might be. One couple who I had considered to be close friends reacted awkwardly when I told them what was happening. They backed away nervously, and our friendship never recovered. Another friend was sympathetic but had problems of their own. Another wanted to be supportive, but our relationship had never been one of sharing intensely personal stuff, so I dropped it. It just didn’t feel right. (In mid-November 2011, at Skepticon IV, that friend and I sat next to each other in the second row with tears streaming down our faces as we listened to JT Eberhard talk about his own breakdown. JT’s words didn’t just hit close to home, they bombed me like a Blitz.) Another friend I reached out to told me that they’d been there and done that, lost everything, and moved on. I felt guilty burdening them when I couldn’t figure out how to move on.

In the summer of 2011, an old romance started to flare back up when an ex-boyfriend and I encountered each other at Socrates Cafe. We didn’t see each other daily but talked regularly. During the period of intensive therapy, he was the only person who made sure to talk to me every day to check on me. He had a crisis of another nature during that time, though. He hung on gamely until Thanksgiving, at which point it was way beyond time for me to give him permission to say goodbye. He was a champ as long as he could be, and loyal to his own detriment. He was the only unselfishly supportive voice that spoke to me regularly and consistently during the worst of that time, and I will forever be grateful to him for that. Once we said goodbye, I had no one.

I was afraid of being isolated, but I was more afraid that I would spiral downward emotionally if I didn’t interact with people. I made an effort to reclaim the positive parts of my life. Things still weren’t good, by a long shot. I had days at a time when I could not make myself get out of bed. There was no one there to care. I stopped trying to make meals. I didn’t have the energy to plan and cook them. There was no pleasure in the effort – and I used to love kitchen chemistry. I gave up on dating. Sharing the mess I had become with someone else would not be fair, right, or kind. It certainly wouldn’t be loving.

For the next nine months, I had no bottom. There was no light to show me how I might get out of the situation I was in. My ragged fingernails clung to a single strand of rope that barely held me above a yawning chasm. It was a very spongy and porous rope that sometimes dissipated almost entirely. Mostly I dangled from it, but occasionally, on rare good days, I was able to climb up and stand on it like a tightrope walker. Standing on it and stretching, I couldn’t reach up far enough to grasp the edges of the bottom I knew had to be somewhere above me. But the source that provided the tightrope regularly threatened to take even that away. Despair consumed me. I made futile stabs at reorganizing my life, none of which were realistic given my limitations and my needs. I had no hope.

Deus ex machina.

A year after that day in September, a light finally broke through. I looked up. There was an end in sight to at least part of my problems. I suddenly had something I could sell to ease the financial stress, and then, with that part of the burden lifted, I could focus on healing. The migraines didn’t go away, but the rope I was dangling from slowly started rising. The pain-free days started looking a little brighter.

In December 2012, things got measurably better. I closed on the sale of two investments, which finally allowed me to breathe financially. I now have a bottom, and instead of it being somewhere over my head in the ether, I’m at least sitting on it. I can touch it. Of course, December 2012 was when I was held at gunpoint for half an hour in my own bedroom, so there’s that.

Finding that bottom made things better. I still have days at a time when I can’t get out of bed. I rarely cook. I still can’t imagine anyone being willing to share their life with me. Some days I still can’t think straight. It’s as though someone has played a bad game of golf in my head and left gaping divots where important parts of my brain should be. I feel the bruises from the ricocheting balls.

Unless it’s so bad I can’t get out of bed, even when I have a migraine I force myself to get out of the house to do the things I still can. The two hours a week spent at Socrates Cafe is still my favorite activity, but more and more often those two hours are more than I can handle. I go to gatherings with my friends and drink soda water because alcohol triggers migraines. (Hell, everything triggers migraines.)  I host parties because I can’t drive with a migraine. More than a few of those parties have lasted longer than I needed them to, and seeing the last guest leave has been a relief. I don’t want anyone to know when that happens.

I hide my headaches from other people. Only a few people know that I have them so often. I doubt most have any idea that I’m often on painkillers when they see me. Instead of incapacitating me, like narcotics tend to do to people who don’t have to take them often, they are what allow me to function. I don’t take them freely; I hoard them and dole them out stingily to myself. I am not addicted, but I do rely on them. Thankfully, because of the reduced financial stress, I have to rely on them less and less.

Life is not done with me. I have things I want to do. I have goals and plans and projects and ideas. I have books to write, things to make, places to go, dreams to fulfill, and things to build. I have a son I adore, even if he doesn’t need me as much as he did when he was a kid. I have a dream that I might even, someday, have a man to share my life with. That’s probably a pipe dream, but every once in a while I take that dream out and fondle it so that I remember how.

Working full-time isn’t an option. I used to think I didn’t need disability insurance – even a blind lawyer can dictate contracts, right? Before I was 35, I never imagined that any health problem would prevent me from earning a living on a long-term basis. Now I know differently.

In a fit of hope, I bought a bike. I can glide when the pace gets too rough, right? Take things slowly and coast. Except, every time I’ve ridden the damn thing, I’ve ended up out of commission for at least a day. I still can’t exercise. Migraines still rule me.

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Dr. Kermit Gosnell, Killer

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is currently on trial in Pennsylvania on murder charges (among others)  because of  practices at his abortion clinic. In January 2011, Gosnell charged with eight counts of murder resulting from gross medical malpractice in treatment of patients at his clinics. The eight victims of his alleged murders were seven infants said to have been killed after being born alive during attempted abortions, and one adult patient who was administered an overdose of painkillers during an abortion.

Medical malpractice is the action of medical providers that intentionally or negligently injure or kill a person in that medical professional’s care. From all accounts I have found and read, Dr. Gosnell is at the very least guilty of egregious and frequent medical malpractice.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is a real-life horror story.

The mistreatment and maltreatment reported by patients and even his own staff is hair-raising. Patients who change their minds about having an abortion, even if their feet are already in the stirrups, must be respected and treated with dignity. Unless the procedure has already progressed beyond a point of no return, it should stop immediately. This is true of any elective procedure, whether it is wart removal, plastic surgery, abortion, or hip replacement.

When I hear of patients infected with STDs because a doctor used unsterilized instruments on them, I am appalled.

When I hear that of bags containing at least 47 aborted fetuses were stuffed into a refrigerator, my stomach lurches. What the hell was the point of that?

My anger rages when I hear a 15 year old girl who changed her mind on the table was physically restrained and the abortion performed anyway. That is abuse. Assault. Battery.

When I think of a live baby’s spine snipped with a pair of scissors, my fury explodes.

Dr. Gosnell has been accused of all of these things. If they are true, he should never be allowed to practice medicine again. Ever. And he should go to jail.

I am not appalled that he was performing abortions. Women need a safe place to have abortions. But Gosnell’s clinic was not safe. Not for them, and not for the babies apparently born there after botched abortions. According to Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, “The grand jury went to the scene wearing Hazmat suits.” The scene was littered with animal feces and stray cats had apparently had their run of the clinic.

Why Kermit Gosnell had Patients

Over the past 24 hours hours, the anti-choice media has been bewailing the fact that the case has not gotten much media coverage. I have seen it in my news feed daily over the last month, so until I investigated further, I didn’t understand why they claimed there was no coverage. Seems that the pro-choice media has covered it thoroughly – because Gosnell’s clinic is a harbinger of what will come if abortion is made illegal everywhere. The anti-abortion crowd has not covered it, because of the focus the case trains on illegal and unsafe abortions, which they know will happen with hyper-regulation and limited abortion access through safe, mainstream healthcare channels. Unfortunately, in today’s anti-choice climate, places like Gosnell’s clinic will become more common, not less. When abortions become illegal, vultures like him will be able to prey on more women.

The anti-choice advocates do not want this story covered, because this story will become more commonplace the harder abortions are to come by.

Women determined to abort the fetuses they are carrying will do so, one way or another. They should be able to do it in a safe, sterile environment that will prevent their own death or incapacity. This was where Dr. Gosnell failed. The women who sought treatment from him got rid of their unwanted pregnancies, but apparently often did so at the cost of their own health and safety.

Why should only the rich be entitled to safe health services? Why should abortion be readily available to wealthy patients, but not to poor ones? In one respect, Dr. Gosnell did indeed provide a necessary and desirable service. His method of purveying it, though, was devastating to his patients.

Gosnell is a symptom of a broken health care system. He is the poster child for why abortion services need to be safe, sterile, and sensibly regulated – not over-regulated so that only wealthy women can afford them.

Late Term Abortions for the Poor

When abortion is too expensive for a woman to be able to afford early in her pregnancy – when it takes her too much time to come up with the expense of resolving the problem of an unwanted pregnancy, she is forced to wait to abort the pregnancy. The longer she has to wait, the closer to viability or even to term she must have that abortion. By making abortion difficult to come by and expensive, we ensure that poor women must wait longer than wealthy ones to have abortions. We create the problem that a viper like Gosnell can take advantage of.

Elective late term abortions are not unheard of, even if they are rare. Late term abortions happen because women are either denied earlier access or because of medical reasons affecting wither the mother or the fetus. If a woman has to wait beyond the point of viability, but is still determined to end her pregnancy, she will still do so. And as long as it remains difficult and illegal for her to do so, she will accomplish her goal illegally. Outlawing late term abortions will not stop them. They are rare even without the legal restrictions. Women who are able to end unwanted pregnancies as soon as they can. They don’t wait for the opportunity to kill a baby.

If his patients had had the chance to go to a clean and safe clinic, Kermit Gosnell would not have had a practice. As someone I spoke with said recently, Gosnell’s clinic was “the template for underground and illegal abortion [mills]. As abortion rights get more restrictive, as people seek to find ways to make them even harder to come by, people looking to make money off this human suffering will find a fertile grounds on which to thrive.”

When a “Baby” is not a Baby

A pregnant woman talks about her baby in the present tense, but she has no offspring yet. We refer to saving the lives of babies when we talk about prenatal health care. The anti-choice crowd talks about saving babies’ lives when they talk about not aborting pregnancies. So when is a baby a baby, and when is it not?

A fetus is the unborn or unhatched offspring of  non-marsupial mammals – any non-marsupial mammal, including a human, a goat, a bear, or a platypus. (Marsupials do not have a fetal stage. They go from embryo to joey instead of from embryo to fetus.) A fetus is dependent on its mother for oxygenation, which is essential to life.

Viability, or the ability of the fetus to live outside the womb, is the measure the Supreme Court uses to determine the point at which the states may restrict abortions. Prior to viability the fetus cannot survive without its natural life support system: a woman. The point of viability is not a clear, bright line for every developing fetus. Some fetuses delivered earlier may live, while some delivered later may not. Medical advances have made it more likely that younger, smaller fetuses can live if their families choose to exercise those so-called heroic measures.

Until living tissue can oxygenate itself, it is dependent upon its mother and is not a baby. It is living tissue, but it lives a parasitic existence. As long as it lives a parasitic existence, its host may either accept it or reject it. We take steps to reject other parasitic lives dependent upon us, whether the parasite is a hookworm or a paramecium. The difference between these parasites and a fetus is that the fetus is a developmental stage of our own species, made with its host’s own DNA. We are more reluctant to reject our own species than we are to reject another. Once a fetus is born it becomes a baby that any other human can care for. After the umbilical cord is cut and the baby draws its first independent breath, it can be given to a wet nurse, it can be held by any other person or set aside in a crib away from other people completely. It is still dependent, but not for each moment of life. Its sustenance can come from anyone, not only from its mother.

Furthermore, after a fetus is born alive – that is, after it becomes a baby at the magic moment of birth – certain rules go into effect. Those rules allow us to remove terminally ill, dying, doomed, and comatose from the medical interventions keeping them alive. There is no legal requirement that heroic measures be taken for anyone, regardless of how long they have been breathing.

Why should there be a legal requirement that life support systems must stay in place simply because of the short length of time since conception? And why should anyone be legally compelled to provide life support for another person at the expense of her own body?

Someone pointed out McFall v. Shimp in a discussion today. In that case, McFall needed a bone marrow transplant and Shimp was the only suitable donor found. When Shimp refused to donate bone marrow, McFall sued. The court famously found that while Shimp’s refusal was morally indefensible, the court had no authority to order him to submit to personal, physical harm and bodily intrusion in order to save McFall’s life, and would not do so. Personal ethics are one thing. Demanding that another person put himself in harm’s way is yet another.

A pregnant woman unwilling to sustain the developing life within her own body is analogous. Every pregnancy has adverse health effects on every woman, Increased heart rate, edema, sepsis, increased blood pressure, hormonal surges…the list of physical systems challenged and even compromised by pregnancy is long and frightening. Then there’s death. Every woman fears death as a result of pregnancy. A woman may be under a moral obligation to provide healthy conditions for the tissue in her womb that has the potential to develop into a human being; however, she is under no legal compulsion to do so.

That is why women who use drugs and alcohol during their pregnancies are not incarcerated.

A fetus becomes a baby when it is born – when the umbilical cord is cut and it takes its first breath of air. At that moment, it is no longer dependent upon another creature’s continued life in order for it to exist. If a pregnant woman dies, the nonviable fetus inside her also dies, as does a viable fetus not immediately removed surgically.

Too often the terms “fetus” and “baby” are used interchangeably. I’m guilty of this, too. It’s the colloquial vernacular. These are not interchangeable terms, though. One means a creature that has not yet been born; the other means a creature that has been born.

A fetus does not become a baby until it is separated from its mother and living on its own, even if “living on its own” means that some degree of medical intervention is necessary. No one condones severing the spinal cord of an already-born baby who otherwise is healthy and able to survive. If the news reports of the testimony at Kermit Gosnell’s trial is accurate, he may have killed at least seven healthy babies – not fetuses.

There is a difference.

Valuing Human Life and Dignity

Valuing human life and dignity takes many forms. Personally, I value the life in existence more than the potential life. I certainly value the dignity of an existing person capable of feeling indignity more than that of a theoretical one.

The inherent point about abortion is that a woman who is determined to end her pregnancy will do so, no matter how much it costs, no matter what lengths she has to go to, and no matter if it may kill her.

I have witnessed abortion. The life, health, and future of my friend having that abortion while I held her hand was more important than the potential life that was then unable to live outside her womb. To this day, nearly 32 years later, she does not regret her choice, and I do not regret making sure she was able to have that abortion safely. I called home from college and asked my dad for the money. My friend could not ask her parents, but I knew my father would help me without hesitation and he did. I don’t know if he believed me when I said it was for a friend, but it did not make any difference to him. A young woman’s future was on the line.

I have also seen ultrasounds. I’ve seen different stages of healthy fetal development, and I have seen severely malformed fetuses in ultrasound after 20 weeks. One such fetus was also aborted. Less than a year later, performing that abortion would have made a felon out of the very humane and humanitarian doctor who performed it.

The fetal human being suffers no more and considerably less than the animals we humans routinely slaughter to eat, and does so with significantly less fear and trauma. It suffers less than a living human being whose artificial life support must be withdrawn because of health care directives. It suffers for a shorter period of time, too, and its death in safe, sterile surroundings does not compromise anyone else’s life or quality of life.

Abortion opponents want us to believe that abortions will stop if they are made illegal. They won’t. More people will suffer at the hands of butchers like Kermit Gosnel is reputed to be.

Butchers like Kermit Gosnell are the reason Roe v. Wade became necessary.

Butchers like Kermit Gosnell are the reason pro-choice proponents despair of ever-restrictive abortion laws.

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Spring Allergies Blow

Trees are trying to screw me. During a weekend spent dipping oak squigglies out of my pool, airborne jizz of various tree varieties has invaded every one of my exposed orifices, spewed onto my delicate skin, and now has me scratching and sneezing and using up yet another tree’s worth of Kleenex.

Benedryl is now my friend with benefits.

I sleep with it.

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Minarets are Pretty, Except in Barcelona

The Taj Mahal has beautiful domes and minarets.

DuPage County, Illinois,  may not discriminate against Muslims, said a federal court last week. Muslims who sought to build a mosque, complete with a dome and minarets, were denied a building permit because the area where they wanted to locate was already saturated with churches. Obviously, if the Christian community is well-served in a specific

Islam and its attendant issues aside, I think domes and minarets look awesome. (source)

area, there is no need to have other religions present. Christians can take care of everyone’s spiritual needs adequately. The county board pointed out that the Muslims had been using space in a local church to meet, so clearly they did not need their own, separate space. The board also said the domes and minarets were too tall, so the mosque itself had to be redesigned to be smaller and set back further from the street.

Churches other than St. Basil’s in Moscow have minarets. For instance, those towering spires on Sagrada Família in Barcelona look an awful lot like minarets to me. I have personal experience with Sagrada Família and its minaret-like spires, and I have first-hand experience with why it is the exception that proves the Good Minaret Rule.

In 1983, my friend Mishy and I talked our parents into letting us spend the summer backpacking through Europe. Armed with Eurail passes and Fodor’s, we crossed the pond almost as soon as we had finished our spring finals. The ink was not yet dry on Mish’s diploma.

Me, in Mishy’s backyard in Auburn, NY, trying on my gear (June 7, 1983)

We made our way from England to Ireland, where we had our hair permed thinking it wouldn’t show as much if we couldn’t wash it very often. Then we crossed to the Continent, visited Paris and the Louvre, then decided to head south to Spain. I really wanted to see southern Spain, because at the time James Michener’s novel The Drifters was one of my favorite books. (My hippie chick-ness has deep roots.) The protagonists of that book were my age and traveled all over Europe and Africa in an amazing adventure that set my imagination on fire. I wanted to see every place they had been. In their footsteps, I was making my pilgrimage to the beach at Torremolinos. Of course, we stopped along the way at major places of interest. First, as we crossed the Pyrenees mountains, we learned that the train tracks were a different gauge in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. We would have to change trains at the border, high in the mountains. At the Catalan border town of Portbou, we disembarked and climbed the nearby cliffs to take in a multi-country view, socializing with other backpacking college students from all over the world.

Waiting for a train between France and Spain
Mishy and me on the cliffs above the Mediterranean at Portbou, Catalonia, Spain (June 22, 1983). No, I have never had a tan.

That photo above is one of the last surviving ones taken in Spain with the really awesome 35mm camera my grandfather had given me a few years before. Oh, I tried to take another. That’s where Sagrada Família comes in.

Anyone who has ever been to Europe has experienced the de rigueur cathedral tours. Europe is chock full of cathedrals because the church has always had a metric shit-ton of money to spend on making awesome places to worship the god who said “there’s really no need to worship me in a building.” After buying some awesome leather in the street market at Portbou, including a pair of fringed moccasin boots made of the softest leather I have ever felt, we boarded the train for Barcelona.

We spent only one day in Barcelona. I’m sure there was plenty more to see, but we felt compelled to leave after only a few hours. We experienced an Omen and felt it best to get out of town.

Upon arriving in Barcelona, we made our way to Sagrada Família, which Fodor’s compelled us to visit, claiming that no trip to Barcelona was complete without it. At the time of our visit, the construction of  Sagrada Família had been ongoing for a hundred and one years, and even with modern technological advances, it was woefully incomplete. Its primary architect,  Antoni Gaudí, had been tragically killed in a traffic accident in 1926 – a mere 43 years into the project. The cathedral was less than 25% complete at the time, by most estimates.

This is what Gaudi wanted the cathedral to look like.

Yes, those are some serious spires. Minarets. Whatever. But despite Gaudí’s golden image of a well-balanced, elaborately detailed work of art, which looked fussy and over-blown to begin with, we have instead a lavishly detailed, clusterfuck of an unfinished building:

The cranes in this image were digitally removed. Despite being under construction for more than 130 years now, this cathedral is still not complete, and no one apparently has any vision as to how it should look when it is done. They just keep building and building and building, and adding more and more overwhelming detail.

Such as the pile of strawberries that tops a spire. Or a Minaret. Whatever.

 

Such as the column that steps on a turtle.
Such as the engraving on the Passion facade of the building, which looks for all the world like an instructional diagram for invading space aliens.
Sagrada Familia Rose Window
Such as the Rose Window that looks like someone colored outside the lines.
http://hulubei.net/tudor/photography/S/a/Sagrada-Familia-Passion-Facade-1/Sagrada-Familia-Passion-Facade-1-Antoni-Gaudi-Crucifixion-Church-Cathedral-Barcelona-Spain-26.html
Such as Christ the Blockhead with, apparently, Poor Yorick’s skull.
Barcelona-Nativity_Facade_of_Sagrada_Familia
Such as the Nativity facade, which has so much friggin’ bumpy detail no one can clearly see the beautifully carved classical figures.

There’s more. Lots more. I haven’t even mentioned the Moorish or serpentine gargoyles, or the magic square next to a homoerotic depiction of Judas’s kiss on the Passion facade, or the weirdly bumpy exterior that clashes with the smooth, Gothic arches.  I haven’t talked about the kaleidoscope effect of looking up inside the building because of those crazy cubist-deco stained glass windows, nor have I said a thing about the interior supports that look like neural connections. I haven’t mentioned the flying buttresses, necessary in early medieval times but completely superfluous in 20th-century construction. The main thing I thought when I saw the cathedral was, “What the hell is going on here?” Come to find out, no one really knew. Nor, apparently, do they yet know.

In the grassy area near the cathedral, I struck up a conversation with an elderly man sitting on a park bench. He was Italian. I didn’t speak Italian, and he didn’t speak English, but I did speak a little Spanish. We understood each other just fine. As we chatted in our fractured way, I stood to take a photo of the awe-inspiring mess of a monstrous structure that is Sagrada Família.

I put my eye to the viewfinder. As I was about to snap the picture, my camera fell apart in my hands.

Literally.

Fell.

Apart.

The lens came out, exposing the film within. The case would not open, so I couldn’t extract the film to save what photos I had taken. The flash fell off.

I am not lying. Sagrada Família, with its excessive detail and its bizarre spires that look like minarets, is so ugly it broke my camera.

The cranes are a permanent part of the structure.

So, there you have it. Minarets are gorgeous.

Except in Barcelona.

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The Best Doctor in the World

My migraines have never responded to prophylactic treatment for very long, but Dr. Robert Lee Archer always has another suggestion. I appreciate his dogged determination to find some way of helping me, and his kind patience when I express my frustration.

His manner is wonderful – it is something I wish all doctors had. If it is possible to teach “personality” to medical students, they should all be required to emulate Dr. Archer’s personality or not pass the course in “bedside manner.”

I have the utmost respect and admiration for Dr. Archer. I’ve been his patient for about 15 years, and he is unfailingly attentive and thoughtful. Some doctors don’t seem to hear what their patients say, but Dr. Archer not only hears, he understands and remembers. I think the world of him, and I wish I could clone him and put him in every doctor’s office I ever have to visit.

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