Ringing in the New Year

So long 2018. It's been real and unreal at the same time.

I spent much of this year recovering from the residuals of last year: 2017 marked the death of both my parents, along with a significant discovery of an unruptured aneurysm, and three negative student experiences in one semester (four if you include the one who died in a car accident). Additionally, one of my church teachers died immediately after our class on anxiety concluded. Therefore, I spent the prevalent part of 2017 in a daze from one experience to another.

So the beginning of this year promised to be better. Then in February, I was astonished once again as my aunt, my father's sister, died in much the same manner as my mother, in her sleep.

Then in March, when life was seeming to return to it's new normal, I found myself in an extended hospital stay from a ruptured aneurysm, one stemming from the very one I'd had surgery on the previous year. I spent three weeks in the hospital, two weeks at home, and another two on half-day duty.

Thanks be to God that I had no permanent long-lasting physical effects other than mental fatigue--more scientifically referred to as as neural fatigue. Other than that, I have the full use of of all my limbs and mental faculties, with the exception of gaps in my memory from those weeks of my hospital stay; I can only lucidly recall the last two or three days of my stay.

All of the other experiences of this year kind of petered out as insignificant in the shadow of my hospital stay. It was such a defining moment that this year seems almost segregated into two in length.

So while this New Year's Eve celebration took me a while to get started and will be on a decidedly smaller scale (no grapes, shrimp, or nachos), I will still ring it in properly if a little more quietly.

Welcome 2019.

The Timeline: Dedication to Daddy, Part II

A year ago today, I was at my father's funeral.

As I look back over the year since his passing, I'm left with a sense of awe at how time seems to be crawling by but simultaneously coursing swiftly. Case in point: my husband and I have been married for six years. In the time we've been married, 8 relatives have died, 5 of which were at the wedding.

When I initially started the idea for this blog, I was just going to direct attention to the November timeline, but it seems that I should provide the timeline on how rapidly my father deteriorated to give a full scope of just how quickly things can change. Let's start with 2011 because that's where the changes began. Forgive me in advance, as some of the times will be vague.

• January: Ayden is born, making Dad a two-time grandfather after a 15-year hiatus of Ariana being the only grandchild.
• May: After forty-odd years of apartment living, my father leaves Valleybrook and moves in a house with my husband and me.
• July 2011:I get into a single-car auto collision while on my way to work, totaling the only truck I ever bought.
• November: Dad quits/loses gas station job in Forestville, after a long struggle with new management and shift changes. It is worth noting that not only at this point was my dad walking independently, but driving and working. In this same month, my father would have a mental breakdown, the first one he'd had in 15 years. The stress of moving from his own place and worrying about how to contribute to household where he lived started wearing on him.
• August 18, 2012: I get married. Dad walks me down the aisle and we share our father/daughter dance to Beyonce's "Daddy."
• February 2013: My dad attends my grandmother's 100th birthday party. In retrospect, in pictures, it was easy to see that my dad wasn't quite himself.
• March 2013: My dad has another mental health breakdown. He also go into kidney failure and codes in the hospital. On a ventilator, he remains in the hospital for an extended period before he is well enough to be released to a rehabilitation center. The new normal changes as he transitions from a wheelchair to a walker. He also has to start dialysis 3 days a week. He never regains his full mobility, but he eventually gets well enough that we believe that he can stay back at home with us.
• June 2013: Niece graduates high school, but Dad is too weak to attend and is still a patient in rehab.
• August 31, 2013: My grandmother dies and we bury her during Labor Day weekend. My mom comments that my dad is an old man :-).

It's at this point, I had to take a break in my narrative. Did all of this really happen in such a short time period?

• Sometime in late 2013: Dad makes it home. New normal is that he gets picked up three days a week by Metro Access and stays home by himself during the day. Little do we know that he gets progressively weaker as time passes.
• December 2013: My brother and niece come home and I "sell" my dad's car to my brother for $1, marking the last of my dad's independence. Ironically enough, in January 2014, I get into a 2nd auto accident with a Dodge Challenger on bad tires in an ice storm and wish I'd never given up the car.
• October 27, 2014, 2am: I get a call shattering my life. My brother died of a heart attack that afternoon in Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia. He'd been fishing when he just fell backward. I had talked to him just that Wednesday, trying to convince him to retire and move closer to home after finding out that he had just been released from the hospital after a second bout with fluid in the lungs and recent pneumonia. We travel to Georgia for a week, leaving my dad with my uncles until he is able to fly down to help bury his son.
• November 1, 2014: I attend my brother's funeral. And my dad is sitting in front of my about 8 feet to my right since he is bound to a wheelchair, flanked by his brothers, while I sit next to my niece. My mom refused to accept it or attend.

The next year goes by quietly as I adjust to the new normal of no big brother to call and gripe to. An uncle dies. An aunt dies. both of them were technically in-laws,but had been married so long before my own birth that there was no separation of them from blood relatives. The uncle lived next door to my grandmother the entire time I grew up and then some, before getting ill enough that he needed around the clock nursing care, and the aunt went in the hospital in late December 2015 and died on New Years Eve. We fast forward again to 2016. In August, my mother decided she no longer wanted to pay rent to her siblings.

This list has exhausted me.

Dedication to Daddy 1

I never wrote a dedication to my father. In fact, after my father died, I stopped writing for a while altogether.

And it's not because I try not to think about my father; I think about him. Every. Single. Day.

It's mostly because even after almost a year of his passing, I still find it difficult to articulate.

Last year, when people noted to me any sympathy for my dad, the only thing I could manage was a watery-eyed response: "Yeah. That was my dude." Even as I type those words, my eyes are glistening, and I have to take a deep breath and a pause.

My dad was my best friend.

What some people may or may not know is that I didn't grow up with my dad as a constant presence in my life. Most of my formative years, my dad was represented as a card in the mail with some money in it or a voice over the phone. He used to tell this story to me about when I was a little girl. Apparently, I walked up to him and asked, "Are you my daddy?" He thought it was the most adorable thing he'd ever heard.

I was not so amused.

I never thought it was cute that I had to question my paternity. Yet as a child, and even to a large extent as an adult, I never understood all the different dynamics that kept him from seeing me. Sure, some of it was my mom's own paranoia, but there was also the fact that my dad suffered greatly from his bipolar disorder and was probably hospitalized more frequently in those beginning stages. It's a piece of my childhood puzzle I was only able to piece together a year before his death when we started seeing a Veteran's Administration physician and she attempted to gather his medical history. It was then I learned that my dad struggled heavily with alcoholism after his Viet Nam tour.

I started living with my dad when I was 17 years old--the July after I graduated from high school. This was supposedly going to be a short-lived arrangement as I was moving into my dorm at George Mason in the fall. But I performed at a below mediocre rate at Mason and Dad said he wasn't paying for another semester, especially since he'd taken out a loan for that first one. So I dropped out of college for a semester and went to live with my dad full-time while I figured out my next move.

We had our power struggles at first. Dad was trying to raise his little girl who'd grown up without him there. Our first struggle came when he made me sit down at the table until I finished my string beans. I didn't do vegetables; Mom had long since given up the battle and often put them on my plate as decoration (seriously--her words, not mine). Dad won that battle. Then at 20, he attempted to enforce a curfew; since he worked at night, I often ignored and flouted the 1am imposition. We ended up compromising when he asked that I be in before the sun. He wouldn't let me drive his car to celebrated when I graduated with my AA even though I'd paid for my degree myself, so I went out and bought my own the next day.

Though we were experiencing these growing pains, we were becoming a unit. I always referred to my Dad the "Carryout King" because although he could cook, more often than not, we would find a take-out spot or a dive restaurant and enjoy a meal. While his favorite cuisine was soul food, we would also find great places to have breakfast or steak and cheese or fish subs. In his own way, he was showing me his city--a place I'd only experienced from windows or the tourist experience. He was DC-bred, so he drove me through his old neighborhoods.

As I started experimenting in the kitchen, he would eat slightly healthier meals, and the refrigerator started getting stocked more with groceries than containers. I would wake him up for work and gradually, he would be better at his attendance, though it would not save him from being offered "early retirement" when the Post Office did one of its sweeping reforms in the early 1990s. My dad would make it to 22 years, just three years shy of full retirement.

We would also develop a habit of accounting for his medicine and curb his drinking habit, which made a big difference in how often he would have manic attacks. By the time we moved out of the apartment into a house, he'd not suffered from a manic attack in ten years.

there's so much more to write that I can't even reasonably put it all in one post, so I'll just end the post here.

Life with Annie Jr.: the Occurrence

So for those who don't know, for the past two weeks I have been in the emergency room at Washington Hospital Center in Washington DC with a ruptured aneurysm. It may have been longer than 2 weeks because I actually went in the day after St Patrick's Day. How did this happen you may ask? The truth of the matter is that it is almost entirely dependent on family history. Many people know that my youngest Aunt, Theresa Jones Hardin Marsh, died of a stroke due to complications from her aneurysm. What many do not know is that my oldest aunt also suffered from an aneurysm and had a stroke, and that two aunts who died before I was born more than likely passed from aneurysms. I say more than likely because of the fact that there was not a whole lot of research out there in the 1970s and quite frankly, even in 2018, there's still very little known about the incidence of aneurysms: why they occur or what makes one more dangerous than another.

What I will tell you is that family history cannot be discounted from the equation. What I can also tell you is that an aneurysm is a vein disease. In my family many of the women suffer varicose veins. Varicose veins are ruptured blood vessels. And while on the surface, they may not seem as serious as an aneurysm, they do cause separate problems, one of them being the possibility of clotting. What people don't realize is that blood clots are serious. They can start off in your legs and travel upward toward your brain. For this reason, now when there is an extended hospital stay or any hospital stay that requires you to be less than ambulatory, nurses and physicians will hook up these non-fashionable leg warmers that are meant to simulate blood circulation. In other words, these things are wrapped around your legs and they give you a massage. And this massage is meant to keep the blood circulating in your legs to keep you from forming blood clots.

I had some of the best doctors in the region who worked on me. What many also do not know is that this is not my first battle with an aneurysm. In August of 2017, an unruptured aneurysm was discovered in my brain. It was only by the luck of the draw, or fortune, or the blessing of God that it was discovered before it came problematic. According to both Dr. Lieu, my radiologist, and the aneurysm research website, statistically around 1 in 50 people walk around their entire lives with an aneurysm. Most do not rupture. However, those with a strong family history are more likely to encounter problems. Therefore, it is especially prudent to have a strong relationship with your primary care doctor.

I went for my annual physical and told my doctor that my mother had passed. Her being aware of my medical history led her to write an order for me to have an MRI, just to be on the safe side. However, my routine MRI turned out not to be so routine as they found an aneurysm growing in my brain stem. In terms of size, it was a little thing--less than the quarter of a dime. However, putting it in perspective, think that your larger veins are not much wider than a strand of yarn. And before you ask, no, I had not been having any symptoms. I was just walking around enjoying life. I very rarely had to take my allergy medication, much less anything else. So this was truly my opportunity to be proactive.

In September, I completed my first angiogram, which is a common procedure for viewing aneurysms, giving a more exact photo of what and where the aneurysm is. An angiogram is essentially a process where doctors shoot colored ink into your veins and arteries of your brain to highlight any issues. The entire process takes about 3 hours as they inject and photograph. Oh, and did I mention, for most angiograms, it is common procedure to keep the patient conscious during the process? In addition, the doctors talk you through the process and warn you of what sensations you should feel as they shoot ink into various areas of your brain. But it is not an exact science. The brain controls every part of your body. As such, there is still so much that's not known about its actual function. Sure, the doctors can guesstimate what goes on where, but since each person is different, each reaction is different. For instance, the doctors were able to accurately warn me when I would feel cooling sensations and warming sensations on my face. However, when they came to the last part where they had to shoot ink into my brain, they prepared me for several different scenarios: I might feel disoriented or confused. What they didn't warn me is that I would feel the urge to run all of a sudden. So while I still remained conscious of where I was what I was doing, I suddenly had an urge to run a marathon! I even told them that I'm fine but I have to run! Luckily, they were prepared for this eventuality and had strapped me down so that I couldn't run. The reality is that I may have had small seizure.

And then the angiogram was over.

After the angiogram was completed, my doctor said to me that most people can return to work the next day. That was not the case for me. I had my angiogram on a Wednesday, and I was not fully prepared for work until the following Monday. I had a delayed reaction disorientation. As a result, I felt unsteady and dizzy. Little did I know that your blood pressure fluctuates from laying to sitting to standing, especially if you do these items too rapidly. So I had trouble rising. I also had trouble dressing. I was fine putting on clothes, but had trouble distinguishing colors and textures when it came to my shoes. For example, I went to work on Monday with two different pairs of shoes. Then I turned around and did the same thing Thursday! On Monday, I didn’t notice my faux pax until around noon and could at least play it off saying that I dressed in the dark because they were two very similar flats. But on Thursday, I came to work late because I got out of my car, noticed that my gait felt different, only to look down and realize I had on a brown leather heel and a patent black heel! I waited for the nearest Payless shoe store to open at 9 o’clock, went in, grabbed a pair of shoes, and then went to work!

So naturally, I was expecting the same reaction of the angiogram for the surgery. And in anticipation I took 2 weeks off. This was not the case. The operation actually went smoother than the initial angiogram. I spent one night and came back. The first week my niece and my husband stayed home. Because of my trouble with the angiogram, the doctor suggested I take twice as much time off for the actual procedure. The second week my niece went back to Atlanta and my husband back to work, and they left me to shop on QVC! After two weeks, I was cleared to drive and return to work on Halloween.

All was well, or so I thought. Three days later my dad fell into a coma and 10 days after that he passed. Because he was military, his burial and headstone were free. However, we had to work around the Thanksgiving holiday. So we eventually buried him the weekend after Thanksgiving on a Monday. Keep in mind that I have lost my mother in March of the same year, my grandmother in August 2013 (the year I turned 40), my brother in October of 2014, 2 uncles, two aunts, a teenage student, and a mentor. In addition, for most of 2017, I had an acid reflux issue that just would not go away. At first, I thought it was merely a symptom of getting older and menopause. However, after consulting with my primary care doctor and my gynecologist, neither had any viable proof and my primary care doctor placed me on a very strong version of Pepcid AC and told me to take it for 45 days.

Eventually, the problem seemed to solve itself. So my girls and I decided that we should go out and celebrate St. Patty's Day and we did so in style. We started off at an Irish pub called Grill 45 which is really good by the way. Then we left there an attempted to go to another party. Turns out that the place had just finished holding one private event and was closing until the next one started. So we ended up at a default bar called The Bottom Line. It's a nice small venue but it's not really my favorite place to go. As a result, I ended up drinking way more than I should have, mostly because I was bored. We finished up around 9 p.m. and I drove home. It is by the absolute grace of God that I made it home intact (although my garage door will say differently). However, I had to go to the bathroom and rushed in the house. I used the downstairs bathroom and apparently stayed in the bathroom so long that my husband was calling me. For whatever reason, I decided against putting on the bottom half of my clothes and went upstairs with just my top where I probably passed out on the bed until the next morning. My husband woke me up early thinking that we had to be where we were early. I asked him to let me go back to sleep and he did. But then I discovered that I had to go to the bathroom.

So I went to the bathroom for number two and after number two I promptly turned around and threw up into the toilet bowl. After both of those incidents, I started to feel a little woozy. So I decided to lie down before I fell down. I may have blacked out for a minute, but after I was conscious I had the presence of mind to call my husband and ask for help. He came in and saw me lying on the floor and wondered what the hell had happened because I was lying on the floor naked with the shower running. I told him I wasn't feeling well and that I couldn't move my neck. He asked me if he should call nine-one-one and after a second when I still could not move my neck, I complied and agreed that he should. This is what probably saved my life. The First Responders came immediately, stuck me in an ambulance, and took me to the nearest hospital. The hospital determined that I had a ruptured aneurysm but said that they couldn't treat it. So I was flown by Medevac helicopter to Washington Hospital Center where I had originally had my first procedure. They took me immediately into the operating room and clamped my second aneurysm, which had stemmed off of the first one and put me the neural ICU, where I stayed for 2 and 1/2 Weeks.

I was released on a Friday afternoon April 6th. It is now Sunday evening and while I am not 100%, I am definitely far better than I was a week ago.

Yes, this is an abbreviated version and more will come later, but I wanted to chronicle this portion while it was still fresh.

The Year of Purpose

I could have died last year. Hell, I could die this year. Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, the inevitable end of our life’s journey on earth is death.

I don’t say all this to be fatalistic or morose; I use it as a simple statement of fact. As one of my Other Mothers pointed out recently, “None of us get out of here alive.” My point is that for the time that I remain here, I am striving to live life with purpose.

While I am partially fulfilling that purpose by teaching, there is still one major thing that I want to accomplish. And that is the publication of my own book. I’ve had one partially complete project in the same stasis for years, and I have a dozen other ideas floating out in different pieces.

In the past few years, I’ve been keeping myself abreast of all sorts of training. Teaching has by far been one of the most lucrative means in which I’ve honed my craft; I am learning more about writing right along with my students each time I read my texts or my notes, or when I find some interesting article about writing or andragogy.

I’ve also been honing my skills by writing. If I wasn’t writing this blog (which I admit I’ve slacked on), I was writing snippets of fiction—ideas that came to me at the spur of the moment, or I was doing freelance writing for actual money, which I’d been doing for the past three years. And while this writing was great, it hasn’t really been writing for me. And most recently, last year, I had the privilege of being editor for not one, but two newsletters, one for my job and another for the local Boys and Girls Club.

And while I’m still alive, I’ll admit that in the last ten years, little pieces of me have died with each person who has left this earthly realm, starting with the death of my aunt, who was one of the main people who always encouraged me to write. I can still hear her voice encouraging me to write a book about my grandmother.

Then in 2013, my grandmother died. She was my muse, my guide, my teacher, my mother all wrapped into one. The absence of her life and her light made the world a little dimmer.

A year after that, my brother died. Where it was easier to accept the passing of my aunt because she had struggled with her health and that of my grandmother because she had made it to a century of life, my brother’s passing was devastating. The way he died was shocking enough, but we were making plans for his third quarter (50+) just the Wednesday before.

An uncle and aunt also passed in the interim. Then in 2017, the triple whammy hit. First, my first cousin died. While I was making plans on how to pay my respects to him in Syracuse, my mom died.

Not 30 minutes before I heard the news, I was saying to my colleague that my mom would probably outlive us all as I’d said a dozen times over a lifetime. So my attention was focused on her mental health and outsmarting her stubbornness. My attention was also diverted by my dad, who’d been on dialysis for almost five years. And right when I had gotten her good, she got me better. To this day, all I can do is sigh and say, “Ah, Rachel,” my usual exasperation.

Fast forward from March all the way to August when it was time for my physical. Serendipity led me to discover that which could have caused my death—an aneurysm. Surgery came and went uneventfully and successfully in October, and all was well with the world.

Until November.

On November 3rd, my dad went into the hospital because of a distended abdomen. Early Saturday morning at 2am would be the last conversation we had together. One hour later, he would be in the cardiac care unit where he would remain until being removed from life support 11 days later. This is the first I’ve tackled this in writing. The most I can say when people offer their sympathy is, “That’s my dude.” As I’ve done with everyone else, he will get his dedicated blog, but just not right now.

Then after his passing, one of my students in my class died in a car crash, followed by one of my Sunday school teachers.

And as of this blog, my only paternal aunt also transitioned as of yesterday morning. Add to that the death of an elderly cousin who checked in on everyone even though he was a distant cousin related to my grandmother. He lived in Georgia and frequently checked in on my brother.

So after saying all of that, you should now see the sense of urgency behind my statement of purpose. Everything I’ve taken on in the past ten years, whether it has been writing, practicing 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, chronicling my daily gratitude, or they Year of Yes and ,the Secret Letters Project, has been toward making me better, stronger, and more resilient.

Now I’m taking the next step. You could call it a step of faith. There is a reason I’m here.