Month: May 2023

I was there on the day I was born, but I do not remember anything about the occasion. My mother had to fill in the details for me. She tells me that it was a cold November day. She had spent the morning gathering pecans in the yard around the garage apartment where she and my father lived on Heights Boulevard in Houston, Texas. I can almost see her crawling around on the grass wearing my father’s wool Army coat to keep warm while hunting for the nuts and storing them in a paper bag. It was so like her to find joy in nature’s bounty. She was a young twenty two year old who was glamorously beautiful with her full head of wavy black hair and her sultry brown eyes.

No doubt she already had plans to use her pecans to create cookies or candies for the soon to come holidays. Instead her back began to hurt so she went inside to lie down for a bit. While she was resting her water broke so she knew it was time to go to the hospital. She called my father and he hurried home from work. Then then two of them traveled the short distance to Heights Hospital where her doctor was already waiting for her. 

Mama never mentioned anything about the birth process itself. It must have gone without incident or she would have said something. So I suppose that within a few hours I was born without incident on November 18, 1948, a bald headed wonder with a chubby face and blue eyes that would quickly turn brown. They named me Sharron Dianne Little with the double letters in each name because my mother thought they looked pretty that way. Being a mom was my mother’s greatest dream, so needless to say she was quite happy to have a little girl to love and cherish for the her rest of her life.

She and my father took me home to the garage apartment that is no longer there. The owners sold both their home and the apartment many years ago. For a time it was the site of a gas station. Later is became a United States Post Office. Now it is home for little shops. Back then it was a cute but small haven for Mama and Daddy who were both quite young and filled with a lifetime of plans. 

Mama tells me that members of the family flocked to the apartment to visit and help her during her first days home. A baby book that she completed for me is filled with cards and good wishes and lots of information about my sleep habits and my nighttime feedings. Pictures from that time show me dressed in sweaters that my grandmothers and aunts had crocheted in pastel colors. Mama bragged that she kept me warm by swaddling me in blankets that were handmade as well. I don’t have to remember those times to know how much I was loved. The care with which my mother created that baby books tells me all I ever need to understand.

My father was still a student at Texas A&M College studying Mechanical Engineering. The institution was not yet a university, but a land grant college founded in the late nineteen hundreds. It was still an all male institution and the arch rival of the University of Texas in Austin. Daddy took awhile graduating because he often had to suspend his attendance to work so that he might save money for food and housing while at the school. He was young and handsome and full of energy, so the pressures of being a student, husband and father didn’t seem to bother him at all. He loved learning and his quest for knowledge would never really end. Going to school was like a holiday for him so these would be some of his happiest of times.

Not long after I was born our family headed for the married student housing area of Texas A&M and my first adventure at a college. My father was a bonafide high spirited Aggie. He never missed a football game and he often dressed me in maroon and white gear. He sung The Spirit of Aggieland to me as though it was a lullaby. Meanwhile my mother joined cheerfully into all of the traditions and often spoke with a kind of reverence of how happy we all were while we lived there.

I have seem pictures of my father hoisting me on his shoulders as he smiled happily in front of the small apartment that we all shared. There are photos of me standing with my thumbs up wearing an Aggie emblazoned sweater. I suspect that maroon will always be in my DNA. To this day it is one of my favorite colors and I seem to wear it well.

I have no real memories of actually existing until my father had graduated and landed his first job. He and my mother immediately purchased a house on Kingsbury Street in southeast Houston. I can remember vivid details of our time there even though I could not have been more than three years old when we first arrived. It was a lovely house with gleaming wooden floors, three bedrooms, a large kitchen and a living room and dining room combination. On the back of the house was a screened in porch that looked onto a huge backyard. Since it was brand new everything about it was shiny and perfect. 

The only thing I remember from before moving to our first real house is a shadowy moment in which I am sitting on my mother’s lap on a boat. We are surrounded by lots of people and I can feel the ship rocking up and down. There is wind blowing in my face and even though I am safely with my mother I had the feeling that I was unsure of being okay. All of a sudden everyone began moving to the side of the boat and pointing to a huge figure that looked like a giant standing in the water. It scared me and I hid my face in my mother’s chest while she cradled me and told me everything would be okay. She and I later surmised that we had been going to see the Statue of Liberty when I was about two years old. Years later when I went there as an adult I had a profound sense of deja vu.

Memories of our new home on the other hand were not frightening at all and I would enjoy our time time there with the unbridled enthusiasm of a very young child. There would be many great times ahead as I went from being the center of all of my parents’ attention to sharing them with new members of my family.

One of my favorite shows is Finding Your Roots on PBS. Right now the program focuses on famous people who invariably find information about their ancestors that they never knew. Some of it is quite exciting and some is quite depressing. Whatever the story, it is a moving experience to learn more about the people from whom one has descended. Invariably those being featured become quite emotional about the information that they learn for the first time. 

I suppose that each of us has a kind of longing to know more about our ancestry. I’ve researched mine for years now and I keep hitting a brick wall when it comes to most of my forebears, but especially my paternal grandfather. I wish I had taken more interest in tying his stories down to specific facts while I had the opportunity to talk with him. I need to know names and places and relationships that I never thought to ask him to convey. Now I am filled with very specific questions the answers of which might unlock the story of one fourth of the people who came before me. 

I recently read an article espousing the idea that each of us should leave a written record of our lives for the descendants who will one day follow us. Every life is important and I can’t imagine anything that would bring me as much joy as actually finding a written self portrait of one of my ancestors. Of course I realize that the reality is no doubt that few if any of them were ever educated enough to learn to read or write. Nonetheless, even one document would be a treasure for me and my children and grandchildren. 

I imagine finding a diary or a sheaf of letters written by an ancestor. Even a small family tree with names and dates would be proof of a life. Instead I only know about my mother and father and a tiny bit about my grandparents. I suppose that writing about them will fall to me. At least it will provide those who come after me with impressions of the people that I have most loved and perhaps from my writings they will be able to understand who I have been as a person better than if there were no stories at all.

My maternal grandmother was illiterate but I have traced our mutual ancestry all the way back to medieval Vikings in Norway. I know that her father fought in the Union Army during our Civil War. I can speak of where her mother was buried and the church that she attended. I see our roots in England and the early days of the American colonies. It is a rich and interesting history that gives me a better idea of how I became the person that I am.

I at least know that my maternal grandparents came from the region that is now the country of Slovakia. I know who their parents and great grandparents were. I have proof that they were baptized as Catholics. I know where they were born and how they traveled on a steamship to come to America. I have access to my grandfather’s naturalization information. Later I even have copies of yearbook pages that featured my mother when she was in high school. 

Only my paternal grandfather remains a puzzle. He explained how is mother died shortly after he was born and he gave me a name for his father. In all of my searches I have found nothing to indicate that his father ever lived or that the grandmother who supposedly raised him existed either. I know who his guardian was after his grandmother died. Grandpa claimed he was an uncle, but nothing in the man’s family tree indicates any kind of connection with my grandfather. It is true that the guardian graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequently died while on active duty Puerto Rico. None of his ancestors have ever heard anything about my grandfather being his charge. 

We would all do well to write autobiographies of ourselves to hand down to our children. I can’t think of anything that would be more of a treasure. I have written a book which is mostly about my mother, but I need to begin working on my own story, a kind of diary of my experiences and my thoughts. It almost sounds like a fun project that is long overdue. I might even turn it into an actual gift for my children and grandchildren. These days it’s fairly easy to find someone who will design a book cover and bind a few copies for little expense. It would be something quite special that I would think would also be exceedingly therapeutic for me. 

I’ve lived through some quite interesting times that now seem like the long ago to young people. A hundred years from now my journey will sound quite ancient and maybe a little bit interesting. I’m ready to begin. Maybe I might even turn my story into a series by writing a bit each day for my blog. Who knows even my readers might find my ordinary life a bit unique. I think I will begin.

The news from around the world can be overwhelming these days. What we often miss are the stories happening nearby that are not impactful enough for the public to learn about. Nonetheless these private tragedies indelibly touch the lives of the families, neighbors and friends of those who know about them. Such was a situation that I stumbled upon as my husband was recovering in the Cardiac ICU at Methodist Hospital in Houston. 

I spent my days with him, often sitting quietly in the background while medical specialists of all sorts hovered over him. He tended to drift off into short moments of sleep when the entourage of doctors and nurses was not poking and prodding and asking questions. I had plenty of time to consider the magnitude of what was happening and to pray for his return to health and for my own strength in caring for him. Those days were a time of quiet contemplation, anxiety, and hope while inner voices, or IVs as a friend calls them, randomly either encouraged or challenged me. 

One evening I was feeling a bit overwhelmed when those of us visiting loved ones in the Cardiac ICU were asked to leave for a time while the shift change of nurses and aides took place. I wandered the halls of the enormous hospital for a time and eventually ended up sitting in a quiet corner of a family waiting room just outside the ICU. 

I was reading and solving word puzzles on my phone when members of a fairly large family began to arrive and discuss the condition of their own loved one who was also in the Cardiac ICU. I realized almost immediately how dire the man’s situation was and I physically felt the anxiety of his mother and siblings who were discussing what their next moves needed to be. I felt funny listening to such a private conversation but leaving the room would have required to me to excuse myself as I walked past each person in the now very crowded room. I instead sat like a Sphinx trying not do move or look up or make a sound. 

Before long the siblings had left to talk in the hallway because their numbers had become too large to cram together in the room. The mother stayed behind leaving me alone with her. As I nervously sat trying to decide what to do, I quietly told the woman that I was sorry that her son was so sick. That’s when she opened her heart to me in a flood of information that was so dire that I could hardly breathe.

Two years before when Covid was devastating the world she had been among the older people receiving the first vaccines. Her son, however, was only forty one so his eligibility for the jab would not come for many months. Nobody worried about him because he was young and healthy and would no doubt make it even if he caught the virus. To everyone’s surprise he got sick and things went terribly wrong almost from the beginning. Covid ravaged his body and he was soon being ventilated in a hospital in San Antonio where it was found that his lungs were so badly damaged that he would need a transplant to survive. 

The man was placed on a Life Flight helicopter and sent to Methodist Hospital in Houston when it was learned that they had a twenty eight year old donor who had died. The woman’s son immediately underwent the transplant surgery and received a new heart as well when the doctors realized that his own heart had been as badly damaged by Covid as his lungs had been. 

According to the young man’s mother it was a beautiful miracle and the next two years were incredibly happy for the entire family. Even with cautionary warnings from the doctors everyone believed that they would enjoy a long life with their son and brother. Sadly he became quite ill once again several weeks ago, not with Covid, but with signs of some kind of infection that was affecting both his lungs and his heart. He returned to Methodist Hospital once again where attempts to return him to health resumed. After forty days he lay in the Cardiac ICU hooked up to a ventilator while his body was rejecting the transplanted lungs and heart. His kidneys were also failing. Death seemed imminent and yet his mother was convinced that he would rise from the ashes of his body once again because it was Easter weekend. Her faith radiated from her eyes as she told me that she believed with all of her heart that it was not yet time for her son to die. 

I saw the mother and her sons and daughters again the following day when I came to sit with my husband. I had brought my ninety four year old father-in-law who struggled to navigate the long walk through the hospital halls to the ICU. I poked my head into the family waiting room and asked how the family was doing. I told them I was praying for their son and brother. They nodded their appreciation but only the mother still seemed hopeful of ulikely miracle for her son. My heart wept for all of them.

The following day my husband was moved to a regular hospital room. I would not see the family again, but I have not been able to forget about them yet and it has been a month since I heard their tragic story. I thought of the serendipity of life and the fact that I and other older people were still rocking along while a once strapping young man may have already died. I felt such sorrow for his mother because every parent knows that losing a child feels like a violation of how things should be. I realized that the family’s story was only one of millions taking place across the world because suffering is as much a part of our human experience as is joy. 

Those few days at the hospital affected me with a resolve to live my own life more fully and without the kind of irritations that are so silly and meaningless. We never know really know what lies ahead in the next moment or the next day. Nothing in life is certain. 

So my husband’s surgery did not go as well as originally planned. Hours after his condition seemed incredibly improved his heart rate and blood pressure began to rapidly fall. A team of doctors and nurses rushed him back to the Cath Lab to see what was happening. They found  a micro leak in the artery that they had just repaired. Blood was escaping from his heart into his chest calling for an immediate repair. It was not a Code Blue but it might well have been one. Suddenly everything looked dark and dangerous as his heart struggle to keep operating properly. I few hours later he was stabilized but stunned that his prognosis had so suddenly changed. 

I suppose that I had spoken too soon about the miracle of unblocking his main artery. It was not the ordinary everyday kind of fix that it had seemed to be and what had happened was not unexpected by his doctors. The human heart is complex in both physiology and emotion. Joy can be beaten down by unforeseen events in matters of health and love. A broken heart can mend but it takes time and patience to get there regardless of whether the goal is literal or physical. 

I sit writing this suddenly ever more aware of suddenly getting bad news about a loved one. It happens all of the time, all around me in this big city where I sit gazing at a township of medical wonder. I listen to the beeping of machines monitoring my husband as he sleeps. It is both restful and terrifying all at once. I think of all of the vigils that I and my friends and family have endured. The worry of it is normal. The prayer and wishing and hoping are part of the process. All the while I see dedicated individuals moving in and out of my husband’s room offering their medical skill and their kindness. 

There are real heroes in our midst and they do not fly through the sky or leap tall buildings. They work tirelessly day after day without laurels. They are the sweet woman who cleans and mops the room to keep it sterile. They are the nurses who insert IVs with one stick that does not hurt. They are doctors whose specialities run the gamut. They work long days rarely stopping, moving from one crisis to another, almost automatically knowing what to do. They prop up me and my husband when we become tired and anxious. They have to tell us uncomfortable truths even knowing that their comments may draw anxious anger. 

I don’t know what the future will bring nor do any of us on any given day. This experience has shown me once again how much we must value each person in our lives. We really don’t know when they will suddenly be taken from us. Even the threat of such a thing is a harrowing experience that we have to face many times in the course of our lives. Practice does not seem to help us react better with each successive time, for the truth is that it is always difficult to watch another person struggling to stay alive. 

My husband is receiving state of the art care. For that I feel so fortunate. He is progressing and will probably get better, but I think of those who don’t come back from a serious health incident or who live in medical deserts without world class doctors and nurses. Sadly there is great inequity when it comes to medical care across the world. For that reason, those who are able come from all parts of the globe for the specialists who are working to patch my husband back together right now. 

This has been a sobering experience as shocking as hearing that my mother had terminal lung cancer or learning that my father had died in a car accident. Nobody wants to hear that doctors had to pound on a loved one’s chest to keep him alive, but we are grateful when there is someone around to do the job. Some people are not that fortunate and I can now imagine how harrowing that must be. 

As I sit here my husband is only peeking out of the woods. He may fall back in at any moment, taking one step forward and two back. The coming days will require patience and vigilance from everyone. The experience has not been without incident and both my husband and I are shaken and reminded of just how fragile our hold on life actually is. 

On the other hand, the outpouring of loving support from family, friends and even strangers has been incredible. I am reminded again and again that humans are essentially kind. It is in our natures to share and to protect each other. For every bad thing someone does there are millions of good actions resounding in contrast all over the world. It’s something we need to remember more often. We are never alone.

I’m in a beautiful waiting room in the Walter Tower of Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. I’ve been here since 7:15 this morning. I arrived early to get my husband prepped for a heart procedure at ten. The plan was to send a catheter from his groin, or his wrist, or both, into his veins and up to his heart where one of his arteries was totally blocked. If all worked well the calcium would come loose and a stent or two might be placed in that artery to keep it open. 

I waited with mostly older women whose husbands were undergoing different procedures with other doctors. Everyone tried to be upbeat and friendly as we strangers shared the common fears that go with such things. Each of us received a tentative probability of success. For my husband it was eighty five percent which sounds good, but the worrier in me looked at the fifteen percent chance of failure and I wondered if it would work at all, especially as the clock kept ticking from one hour to the next for close to four hours. 

People had come to the center made famous by Dr. Michael DeBakey, a trailblazer whose pupil Denton Cooley eventually performed the first heart transplant. They sat in tiny group in the large and airy waiting area sharing stories of their loved ones’ heart problems and the journeys that brought them to the Houston Medical Center. I found myself listening raptly and feeling fortunate that I live only twenty minutes away from the hospital and that the whole procedure had only cost one hundred dollars because my husband has a Medicare Advantage Plan. 

I wondered what people in small towns or without insurance do when they or a loved one has a serious heart defect. I found myself feeling good that my husband and I had been so careful during the height of the Covid pandemic. We took every vaccine that was available, religiously wore masks, and mostly stayed home. I worried about what would happen to my husband if he caught the virus. His oxygen level was never higher that ninety five even in the best conditions. His artery was blocked and he had already had a small stroke that luckily did not leave him handicapped. I had been like a police officer enforcing rules that I hope would keep him well until he was able to get that artery open. 

I thought about all of that while I waited. One hour, two hours, three hours, almost four passed. Most of the people who had been there with me had already heard about their loved ones and had left. I watched new people coming in for the afternoon appointments as the time inched toward three. Finally a nurse asked me to accompany her to a private room where the doctor would let me know how my husband had fared. She was kind enough to smile and assure me that it would be good news. 

I gathered my belongings, a laptop, a phone, some food and drink and followed the nurse like a little lost lamb. I was feeling shaky in spite of her insistence that all was well. I waited for the doctor to arrive and thought about the thousands and thousands of people in the Medical Center at that moment. Some were getting good news, some bad, some were dying. It was sobering to think about all of the humanity feeling so many different emotions in a single moment.

The doctor was confident and informative. He explained exactly what he had found and what he had done. He was happy to announce that the procedure was a success even though it had been more difficult than he had expected. He said that the blockage had been like concrete with no blood flowing through whatsoever. With patience and skill he and two other doctors were able to clear it completely and then install three stents. He said that blood immediately began flowing through the artery like a river that has been freed from a dam. I was elated and thanked the doctor profusely for his skill. I thought about all of the progress that has been made in healing hearts over the years. I realized that in another time my husband’s prognosis might have been very dire. It was a sobering thought. 

After a little wait I went to see how my husband was doing. He looked happy and he was filled with goals for eating healthy, losing weight and sticking to an exercise program. I now realized why he had so often been out of breath, having to stop walking long before he should have. He was already doing better with an oxygen level of 98 and a really good blood pressure. It seems that he and many others may have new leases on life from this one day. How many thousands of times are such stories repeated by doctors dedicated to saving lives? I have a former student who will soon be leaving for Stanford to do a fellowship in pediatric cardiology. He has already completed a residency at Texas Children’s Hospital. We will attend his farewell party with even more respect for what he has chosen to do. It’s remarkable to think that he may one day help a little one with a heart defect heal. I know how those parents will feel. I felt a roomful of emotions with my husband’s experience. We really do live in extraordinary times.