the story

Please let me introduce myself . . . 

This  is a story of two college-educated medical transcriptionists who stoically  endured serious  karma

I met birddude at a Mensa Summer of Love party when I was 28


Our young marriage was challenged by whelping two defective kids.  First-born was unplanned, a forgot the condoms oopsie who manifested by making me  barf too much to drive to the second day of the Dead's run at Cal State Dominguez Hills.    Not aborting was the stupidest mistake I ever made.

K needed $100,000 of orthopedic care for hip dysplasia by age six.  They endured months in hip spica casts.  Diaper changes sucked hours of production from my wfh medical transcription gig.  Kay was on the spectrum, too socially anxious to tolerate even Waldorf school.

{btw, pic is stock photo.  I dont share my kids' images online.  I actually have no pics of what they endured.  We weren't picture-takers in the early 90s.}

We perched them on a bean bag chair in a little red wagon and went to the library, museum and one memorable Grateful Dead show.  Birddude dropped us off by the gate.  I Iost my grip on K's cast.  Twenty Heads lowered them to the ground safely.

Followed that up by having a 27-week preemie after a LEEP for cervical cancer.    I was admitted for an unsuccessful week of mag sulfate tocolysis.  D and I both picked up nosocomial pneumonia from a hacking phlebot, so from my womb he was untimely amniotomed.  Doc Pearsall sidled in holding the amniotome behind their back.  

Aunt Laura visited once to donate blood.    Dylan unleashed a The Shining elevator fountain of  poo that dripped down the wall of the Isolette.  Laura fled.

The whole package cost $1/4 million.  D spent ten weeks in the NICU.  I lost three hours of work  each afternoon, walking to the NICU to deliver pumped breast milk and given him two hours of kangaroo care {skin-to-skin bonding}.

Birddude and I  moved to Eugene shortly after 9/11, fleeing high NorCal rents.  My artist sister told us about Eugene's anarchist district, the Whitaker.

We settled into a weekly rent motel.  The kids enjoyed tv and handheld Nintendo devices.  We checked out the food carts, found the library and did the whole existence thing. 

I worked until the afternoon when a nauseating thunderclap headache  sent me to the bathroom to vomit, where I promptly forgot how doorknobs work and woke up a week later from my coma as Moaning Myrtle's roommate.  Myrt had painful skin breakdown at their colostomy site.

 Stabilized at Sacred Heart I was discharged to the street at 1am.  A kind woman on the street phoned birddude.  We slept on the top level of the Overpark Building while making phone calls to keep in touch with social workers arranging Medicare and my aneurysm repair at OHSU and to inch along the transitional housing wait list.  We walked miles to eat dinner at 11am  four days a week at Food for Lane County's Dining Room.

After we completed SvDP's transitional housing program, East Blair Coop gave us our first break.  We've remained precariously housed since.

$700/month.  Killer steps.