151. Lewis and Clark

There are lots of things that have happened throughout history, many of them being unpleasant. All of them have brought us to this moment right now, and, of course, that is a good place even with its terrifying emotions and its pleasant emotions. One of those historical events that has put me here at this point is the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Corps of Discovery.                                                                            

All through childhood I knew about these two great explorers because I live right in that part of Idaho where they journeyed. They and their crew were the first Americans to traverse the continent and cross the continental divide to make it to the Pacific. They were commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson and because of that willingness to explore the unknown expanses of the northern Great Plains, the northern Rockies and the Pacific Northwest I am living in this part of what is now the United States. The whole discovery is a connection of peoples from the King of France who gave a good deal to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase to the willing explorers, the friendliness of the indigenous peoples, to those of us living here in the present. Of course they were all human beings as are we. We are filled with complexity and because of that, not everything from what we do works out for the best just like that journey of discovery. It is the existential crisis of being human but it is also what got us to where we are. I very much appreciate the struggles that Lewis and Clark endured, the sense of responsibility that they carried and the huge gift they gave their posterity, one of which is me.                              

Among the Corps were such people that legends are made of. There was the French Charbonneau and his Shoshone wife, Sacajawea who was born in what is now Idaho and graces her name to several things in this state. The man York, who was enslaved by William Clark, probably experienced the greatest freedom of his life in those two years of exploration. Others in the Corps returned out west later to gain fame as the mountain men. And the journalists themselves, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark themselves, left us amazing drawings during their time fording great rivers, crossing the divide of the continent with all its struggles, spending a dreary damp winter on the shores of the Pacific, meeting with the many amazing tribes of indigenous people who befriended them, and then returning all that distance back to the little outpost of St. Louis. All of these men and one woman formed an indelible relationship with one another and the land that has enriched these United States and the peoples of the northern states of the west.                                                                                                        

I have such admiration for the foundations of our country, in spite of all it’s heartache, and the great men and women seeking independence and freedom with all their baggage of wrongly preconceived ideas. In spite of all their flaws they created this country out of pain and struggle and they left their unfinished work for us to continue to be “We, the people of the United States…” I am overwhelmed by pride and admiration for these amazing people of the Corps of Discovery.

Wear Your Mask

This is what a child on ECMO looks like: my son at three and a half.

             

About 18 and a half years ago our youngest son got some childhood virus, Roseola, as kids will. He was three and a half and had never really been very sick before. At first, he didn’t seem to get too sick from this one either, but we now know that it takes him much longer to recover from viruses than the rest of us because his cells go into an energy deficit due to what we now know he has, mitochondrial disease. After about a week of just being tired, but no longer sick, he began to revert in his walking patterns, using furniture to hold himself up. He ate continuously, sat around and did very little even falling asleep at the table in the middle of eating, and within a couple of weeks he had gone from a little over forty pounds to another ten pounds in weight gain. Remember, he was just over three years old. We became frantic, taking him to our doctor every day as he began to struggle with breathing. He had blood tests, a terrifying MRI from which he struggled to wake (as mito patients will do from the wrong anesthetic), and finally our doctor sent us to Seattle Children’s Hospital, where at the end of the weekend he grew even more sick to the point of both lungs succumbing to complete diffuse hemorrhaging. That Sunday night and into the very early hours of Monday he was, with our permission, put on a ventilator and then ECMO (extra corporeal membrane oxygenator), a heart lung bypass machine used to oxygenate the blood in absence of working lungs. Our son was drowning in his own blood because of an energy deficit and organ shut down caused by a virus that for most is typically benign. He was on ECMO for a week and the ventilator for two weeks and we stayed in the hospital for three months, bringing him home with a jog stroller and orders for tons of rehabilitative therapy to get him to eat and walk on his own.

Now, during this COVID-19 pandemic we are becoming more and more wary of people, knowing full well that we can not bring this disease home to our son. Wen this all began I thought it seemed a bit overblown since there was no evidence of the disease in our very rural area. We have typically been vigilant against other known viruses such as Lyme Disease and West Nile Virus just using insect repellent and avoiding buggy areas, but we have not enclosed our son in a bubble because we believe in living a full life. Now that everything has been shut down and people are tired of going half a year without vacations, normal shopping, movies, school, etc. the disease has made it here, as I discovered by possibly being exposed in my quest to start our school year responsibly. People here have had no evidence of the severity of the disease and they no longer have the capacity to take it seriously. I cannot be one of those people. I must take all viruses seriously in my home, even as we have always resisted living in a bubble. My son endured another bout of illness, probably contracted on an airplane, and again was hospitalized when he was in the third grade and we had returned from a summer vacation in Europe. This second bout seriously made us rethink how we expose him to the outside world, yet he has continued to live his life as an active member of our community, constantly raising awareness of mitochondrial disease.

Now that the country wishes to return to school, now that I have missed two weddings for important people in my life, now that I have to evaluate what I am going to do this year as my final year of teaching I will be physically distanced and I will wear a mask and shield. I will cause my students grief when they poo poo my vigilance. And I don’t want to be vigilant only for my own family, but for others as well. Remember that I lived for three and a half years blissfully ignorant that anyone in my family was so vulnerable to seemingly invisible opponents. I know that so many of us are unwittingly vulnerable to this very real disease and I wish to protect those people as well. So I implore you all to wear your masks when you are with others outside of your immediate circle. Protect yourself. Protect us all.

150. Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes

“Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean

And so betwixt them both, you see, they licked the platter clean.”

           

These random little rhymes were taught us from infancy. Sometimes we learned them from parents singing to us, sometimes we learned them from teachers at school, and sometimes we never really learned them until we got older and read a few books. There are zillions (or seemingly so) of them but we, here in America, got most of our nursery rhymes from a very clever, real person living in colonial Massachusetts (which explains references to pound, pence and London Towne in distinctly American rhymes) having been born in England. In reality she is a conglomerate of mothers of the Goose name in Boston and she is sometimes credited with being a woman named Mary Goose. I don’t know much about her, but I’m a cemetery fanatic but once upon a time I encountered her grave in the cemetery next to the Boston Commons.

            Sometimes I find an odd comfort in those old nursery rhymes, “Wee Willie Winkle runs through the town in his nightgown…” They come from a place of safety in our minds from long ago and, more importantly, they are the reassurance of our ancestors from ages back letting us know we would be okay. Who knew that there were fad diets even in the 1600’s? Mother Goose as she aptly wrote of it in Jack Sprat (if indeed that is one of her rhymes…) And here we are renaming old diets with things like the Paleo Diet or the Atkins Diet or whatever. It’s either a no fat or no lean diet, isn’t it?

            I would venture to guess that more English-speaking people quote Mother Goose than the Bible or William Shakespeare. Maybe I’m giving her too much credit. So what if she was just a collector of folk verse? I am pretty sure she made up a few of her own and those were collected, then redone for new children and originally penned by dear old Mother Goose? She’s as much a fairy tale as her rhymes.

            Even here as I write in the summer sun and notice a spider, I can’t help but think of Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet breakfasting on curds and whey (I’m not a fan of whey, but curds are wonderful). “Along came a spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffett away.” Like Miss Muffet, I’m not a fan of spiders but I’m a more modern American, so when I see a spider I just smash it.

            I find it easy to slide back into childhood with one of those little rhymes, and also an imaginary earlier time of innocence where little pigs go to market and stay home and eat roast beef (!) and cry whee whee all the way home. All periods of life have had difficulties, yet when the plague raged we inherited “Ring Around the Rosie,” so now while we’re being plagued by a new virus I find myself returning to the age old comfort of Mother Goose rhymes and the snippets of another age that was also tough, yet mothers and fathers still loved and comforted their children, and now we, their grandchildren still love and comfort our children with the same rhymes. Funny how comforting our children comforts us. Funny how we think so many things are new, yet really they are simply reiterations of the past. Funny how that is comforting.

            “Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his Christmas Pie. He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said, ‘My, what a good boy am I.’” While most of us don’t have plums in our Christmas pies, its fun to think of it, isn’t it?