Places to visit - the Hospital

Sorry I haven't been posting lately, in case anyone is actually out there visiting this blog!?! I was in the hosptal, so this post is about Lady of Lourdes Hospital and about Health.

While at the end of my Saturday shift volunteering at the James and Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield, National Park on July 16th I began to experience heart pain. It had actually been happening off and on for some months but it always went away. Twice in the Spring, it had gotten really bad - a squeezing pain like a muscle cramp in my chest and my left arm went numb with tingling in my fingers of that hand. On those occasions, I simply took another high blood pressure pill and chewed a baby aspirin and it went away. On the Saturday of July 16th, however it didn't go away. I had also experienced excessive sweating and lightheadedness while grocery shopping the day before as well, so I got really worried. The pain lasted all night, so in the morning, I called my sister and she came over and took me to the hospital. >p/> One of the volunteers with whom I had been chatting when the pain started, told me the same thing had happened to him and when his pain lasted all night, he told his wife he thought he should go to the hospital. He had a heart attack at the hospital. That helped to convince me to go. Also, he told me he'd had a catheterization and a stent and he explained it to me in such a way that it relieved some of the terror I had about going to the hospital and having to have that done.

At Lady of Lourdes Hospital, every single person I met from the emergency room check-in to the monitoring nurses in the emergency cubicle, was wonderfully kind, courteous and reassuring.

It was my good fortune to have as my roommate a lovely woman, my age, who had come in with almost exactly the same symptoms. She had her adult children visiting in shifts and both she and they were kind, thoughtful, entertaining and encouraging as we went through our tests and procedures.

I am telling you this now so that if anything similar happens to you, you won't hesitate to go straight to Lady of Lourdes which is now under the Virtua umbrella and is their Heart Center! A cardiac doctor saw me in Emergency, then I was taken to my shared room. The nurses on our floor were unfailingly kind, thoughtful, and even shared personal anecdotes about family and their lives. It was extraordinary.

The tests were all much easier than I had expected thanks to the skill and expertise of the surgical nursing team and the entire staff. The catheterization was very quick and nearly painless. They go in via your arm now, not the groin, and it really only took about 10 or 15 minutes. You are awake in some kind of twilight anaesthesia, but entirely pain free and there must have been some brief lack of consciousness because I really can't remember the doctor doing the procedure, it was so quick. It was way way easier than a colonoscopy but more or less on that scale.

Both my roommate and myself had that procedure and we both had echocardiograms which show how the valves are working and the heart muscle. The catheterization shows whether there are blockages or narrowing in the arteries, in which case they can put a stent in immediately.

To my great relief it turned out that I had suffered coronary artery insufficiency due to my high blood pressure medications no longer being effective. I had no blockages and needed no stents, just a new and stronger medication. My poor roommate, however wasn't so lucky. they found she had an aortic aneurism. So I got to go home, and she had to stay for another procedure.

Nobody ever wants to go to the hospital, but I assure you that if you do, Lady of Lourdes is wonderful. I don't honestly know how the staff can maintain such calm, patient and warm demeanor with all they have to see and do on a daily basis. They really are Heroes.

By the way, a little historical note. I was at Lady of Lourdes Hospital, in Camden, when I was 16 back in 1962. Our new development had so taxed the local sewage system that they were releasing raw sewage (or it was escaping) into the Pennsauken Creek where all of us kids regularly swam. Fourteen of us contracted hepititis from it, and by the time mine was caught and diagnosed it had gotten bad. I was YELLOW from the formerly whites of my eyes to my toes. Back in those days, there were still nuns working in the hospital and I remember even then how kind everyone was and how from my window I could see the younger nuns in the back yard of the convent. We have a history, Lady of Lourdes and me.

The DASH diet was on my list from the hospital and I had a book on it and I have been following it religiously - I was motivated! As you might guess, it is a fresh produce, plant based diet which cautions us to note the sodium in anything we consume that comes packaged and also the sugar content. Since I was already a vegetarian (probably why I had no blockages) that part was easy for me, but it took a little effort to get out of my lazy food habits (pizza) and start steaming vegetables to put over rice or mix with pasta and to make sure I incorporate blueberries, bananas, strawberries and other berries in my high fiber granola cereal every morning.

the reward of my food effort is that I feel wonderful again and so grateful to be alive. The moral of the story is, if you have chest pain, don't hesitate - go straight to Lady of Lourdes. They will take good care of you. By the way, another motivator was that my neighbor's father had died just two weeks earlier from a sudden heart attack and he was more than 15 years younger than I am. Don't smoke, eat fresh fruit and vegetables, and don't wait if you have chest pain.

By the way, here is how simple it can be to eat fresh: aside from the berries and granola for breakfast, you can get grated carrots at the grocery store, and wash and chop some broccoli or cauliflower and put low-fat cottage cheese on it for lunch, and you can steam those and other vegetables and mix them with penny pasta and a low fat sauce for dinner! Voila!

Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital opened in 1950, five years after I was born. The statue of Our Lady of Lourdes which sits atop the hospital was carved of Indiana granite in 1949. In 2011 it was damaged by an earthquake which also damaged the Washington Monument. Children in schools and parishioners all over South Jersey raised money to have the statue repaired and restored to her setting atop the hospital. She is now also crowned by a holo of lights and can be lit with different colors denoting a successful organ transplant, breast cancer awareness, heart health month, or, as was done recently, to celebrate the joining of Our Lady of Lourdes with the Virtua Health System. Camden City is lucky to have two stellar hospital to serve the surrounding communities, Cooper Hospital, and Our Lady of Lourdes.

Stay well my friends and Happy Trails! Jo Ann

The ownership of Women's Bodies

Just now, I finished an article in the most reecent issue of Smithsonian Magazine about women traveling to North Dakota for divorces back in the late 1800's to early 1900's. This article seemed expecially prescient as we have just seen another change in the laws governing women's bodies - the overturn of Roe versus Wade, shuttled back to the States for their patchwork of revolving laws. Back in the time of the Dakota divorcees's, the states all had their own laws governing who could divorce under what circumstances and who got control of the children, men. For the most part, in most places, because women were not enfranchised, they had little control over how the laws were created and passed and as a result little control over their own lives, especially once married. Up to that time, in most places, women had NO legal protections whatsoever. They couldn't own property, sign contracts, inherit from parents or be prepared in any way for independent life through education as most higher education was denied to women. There were few ways for women to earn money outside of service such as laundry, or cleaning, service jobs, or of course, the selling of their own bodies in prostitution which especially in those days doomed them to death from veneral disease and violence.

Women had fought piece meal for changes but it wasn't until the Suffragists that real strides began to be made. Even in the Suffrage battle, the lines were drawn between the Suffragists who believed it should be fought at the State level, and those younger, next generation Suffragists like Alice Paul who believed it had to be fought at the Federal level with an amendment to the Constitution. During the time when women had no legal protections, even if a woman found a job at a mill, for example, her husband could legally claim her wages. He ould legally claim her body, and it was even legal for men to reape and beat wives as long as they didn't use a stick thicker than their thumb "rule of thumb" - and although marriage was the only course open to women for their adult lives for their survival, it was another kind of trap.

My great heroes have always been Margaret Sanger (birth control pioneer) and Alice Paul (Suffrage activist). At present I am reaading the biography of Alice Paul written by J.Zahniser and Amelia Frye. It seems so pertinent in this particular time of attack upon the rights of women to control their own bodies. Birth Control saved us. I was able to get my own education because I had access to birth control pills via Planned Parenthood. In those years from 20 to my thirties, I was able to get two college degrees and a career with a livable wage and benefits. Those benefits support me now in my old age. That living wage made it possible for me to buy a small house in which I still live.

I was divorced thirty-seven years ago. A long time ago I was able to forgive my ex-husband for his abusive, threatening behavior because I learned more and more about mental illness and I realized a lot of his rages and destructive outbursts were out of his control and the result of his illness. Nonetheless, I am sure he and I have vastly different opinions on whether I should have had to stay and endure them, and even if they were abusive. He probably felt justified in expressing his volcanic rage when it overtook him, and in breaking things and terrorizing me. I am sure he didn't even suspect the effect of his behavior on others, his parents as well as on me. Anything could set him off, most usually car trouble, but also anything going wrong in the home. Then he turned his fiery temper on me, because I was there, and because I was physically weaker, and also observably non-violent. He had nothing to fear except that I could leave him.

Recently, a 40 year old man was burned to death in a crash of a jet fueled stunt truck. Beneath the news article was a comment vilifying the way yahoo described the accident and accusing the news service of engaging in "leftist war on testosterone."

There is a gender battle going on in America today, not to mention in many parts of the world. The war is one of women trying to escape male domination. Often general public opinion seems to reflect the idea that any rights for women is a direct attack against male privilege. It is true that it is an attack on male domination over women. The main ways we must achieve independence is through control of our reproductive lives, education, careers that pay enough to live, and a voice in the laws that govern our lives. Sadly, the most excessive male domination is on world-wide display currently in Afghanistan where women can no longer be educated, move through their communities independently without a male guardian (guard) or exercise any control over their lives at all. They must be covered from head to toe because women are even held responsible for male lust in the world of the more backward Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan.

What surprised me was how recent the divorce laws changed in places I thought of as bastions of liberal thinking - New York didn't change their divorce laws until 1960. When I got divorced, my exh-husband started the process because he had moved to Colorado and could use the no-fault laws to divorce me without having to give me any share in our joint property. What kept me from fighting him on the property issue was that he had a gun and that he was mentally unstable. In other words, he intiidated me with the threat of violence. I figured I could always get another house but I couldn't get another life. It was a price I was wiing to pay to be free of him. There is where gun violence figures into the equation too - domestic intimidation and violence through GUNS. The woman who had traveled to the Dakotas for her divorce, Blanche Molineaux, was seeking a divorce becaue her husband was in prison for murder. Even murder wasn't considered a sufficient cause for divorce in her own state of New York. The only cause was adultery. Interesting, because in the earlier part of the 1800's, a man could murder his wife and be exonerated if he suspected she had been adulterous. Most of the people in the Dakotas seeking divorce in the heyday of the divorce colony were women. Later Nevada became the new mecca for quick divorce.

Personally, I think animal agriculture has a lot to do with the struggle over control of our bodies. Since people can kidnap and enslave animals, breed them, imprison them and kill them, it is a short step to expand that domination to the control of women, much like the dystopian novel and recent tv series portrayed it - The Handmaid's Tale. Lots to think about, especially if you are a woman and a woman with a daughter! But just as our determination and perseverence has brought us this far, it will carry us forward to battle against the rising tide of injustice that faces us now.

May justice prevail! Jo Ann