GROWING UP IN 20 YEARS
I’ve just lived through a couple of difficult weeks. There is a tumor that sits somewhere in my pelvis and puts pressure on the sciatic nerve in my right leg. The pressure creates pain from my hip down the entire length of my leg. Usually there is only an ache that persists, even to the point of interrupting my sleep, making for difficult, sleepless nights. On a scale of 1 to 10, I usually report that ache as a 4 or 5. No matter how many drugs I take for that pain to go away, it rarely ever cooperates. But it is the screaming pain, like sticking a dental tool into a cavity and hitting an exposed nerve and registers a 10 plus, that sends me scrambling for help. The pain paralyzes me and wakes me from a sound sleep. The doctors and nurses have changed medications many times in search of a remedy to the pain, but time after time the change in medication has been ineffective. One of the severe pains woke me this week, however, and the hospice nurse suggested, then with my doctor's approval ordered a medication called Neurontin. Neurontin is most often used for help with the discomfort of neuropathy, but has sometimes been used successfully with pain of other kinds. Apparently it blocks the pain messages sent from the brain to the affected area. After just one dose I noticed something happening in my head. I felt a little groggy and disoriented. By the next couple of doses I noticed less aching in my leg and by the 3rd morning it had totally kicked in and I was pain free. Time will tell if I have a recurrence of the acute pain, but I believe Neurontin, together with the Fentanyl patches are going to give me a life back. For the first time in months I’ve been able to lie prone on my bed and give up the recliner for all my sleeping. No more of that constant, nagging ache that has plagued me for a couple of years. Though I still use a walker, I am walking straighter since I don’t have to give in to the pain in my hip. I feel as if I’ve been given a new start on life and am comfortable for the first time in 2 or 3 years. We may have to adjust the dosage for one or both of the medications as time goes by, but I’m very hopeful this rather simple combination will enable me to live more comfortably.
I’ve given a lot of thought since my post last night to the racial divide that plagued this nation and I felt the shame of my own naiveté and indifference. As I thought about all the years soon after my marriage, I realized that a huge amount of who I became as a person and what makes me tick today was tied up in the years between 1958, when I graduated from high school and left my parent’s home, to the very early 80s. Those years encompassed not only race issues, but the Vietnam war years and other momentous events of the 60s and 70s. I did more growing up during the 2nd twenty year period of my life than I did during the first twenty year period.
Jim and I married in 1958 when I was just 2 months shy of being 18. I successfully graduated in an all white class in McCrory, safe from armed military guards and outward racial hated, and began life in a more adult world.
I voted for the first time in 1960 for John F. Kennedy and joined with millions more in cheering for him and our beautiful, perfect country. By 1962 Kennedy was providing military advisers to South Vietnam, though I learned that aid had been provided by the U.S. before 1960. What started with a hand full of advisers steadily increased each year to 500,000 U. S. troops in 1967 and ended in 1975 with the last members of the U. S. Embassy Staff evacuating by helicopter from the roof of the embassy. Over 3,000,000 military and civilian Vietnamese lay dead, along with 58,000 Americans, and 500 Australians. When the war started I felt very removed from it, just as I had felt removed from any racial problems.
In the 13 years between the beginning and the end, however, many things took place, including a change in my attitude about almost everything. By the end of the Vietnam era I was 35 years old and had seen one president assassinated and another disgraced by the Watergate scandal. I’d also wept and been outraged by the Kent State shootings in 1970 and had become very aware, through the civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King, of the racial problems that shamed our nation. I was no longer an unaffected or witless bystander. In 1968 both my father and Martin Luther King lay dead in their graves, King by an assassins bullet. No longer naïve or trusting in my government I, like millions of other Americans, had lost confidence in our leaders and was suspicious of the justice systems involving the FBI and CIA. My distrust and dislike spread even to the local police, who seemed to become more brutal and crooked each year...a dislike that most likely started when I was a child and watched my policeman uncle abuse my aunt and two cousins. I spent those 13 years being a wife and raising two children, but wishing I could have joined other young people as they made their way to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and to Woodstock and many points in between. I had wanted to go to Washington to protest the war, or to Selma, Alabama and join King in fighting racial injustice. My husband, who had been just as uninformed and naïve as I when we married, became more conservative and stiff during those 13 years, as I became increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo and became more liberal. Cracks that had emerged in the marriage during the years since 1958 became wider as he seemed to stand in place and I changed into an almost totally different person, until by the end of the 70s, a wide chasm stood between us...a chasm that was more and more often filled with dissatisfaction and resentment.
I’ve given a lot of thought since my post last night to the racial divide that plagued this nation and I felt the shame of my own naiveté and indifference. As I thought about all the years soon after my marriage, I realized that a huge amount of who I became as a person and what makes me tick today was tied up in the years between 1958, when I graduated from high school and left my parent’s home, to the very early 80s. Those years encompassed not only race issues, but the Vietnam war years and other momentous events of the 60s and 70s. I did more growing up during the 2nd twenty year period of my life than I did during the first twenty year period.
Jim and I married in 1958 when I was just 2 months shy of being 18. I successfully graduated in an all white class in McCrory, safe from armed military guards and outward racial hated, and began life in a more adult world.I voted for the first time in 1960 for John F. Kennedy and joined with millions more in cheering for him and our beautiful, perfect country. By 1962 Kennedy was providing military advisers to South Vietnam, though I learned that aid had been provided by the U.S. before 1960. What started with a hand full of advisers steadily increased each year to 500,000 U. S. troops in 1967 and ended in 1975 with the last members of the U. S. Embassy Staff evacuating by helicopter from the roof of the embassy. Over 3,000,000 military and civilian Vietnamese lay dead, along with 58,000 Americans, and 500 Australians. When the war started I felt very removed from it, just as I had felt removed from any racial problems.
In the 13 years between the beginning and the end, however, many things took place, including a change in my attitude about almost everything. By the end of the Vietnam era I was 35 years old and had seen one president assassinated and another disgraced by the Watergate scandal. I’d also wept and been outraged by the Kent State shootings in 1970 and had become very aware, through the civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King, of the racial problems that shamed our nation. I was no longer an unaffected or witless bystander. In 1968 both my father and Martin Luther King lay dead in their graves, King by an assassins bullet. No longer naïve or trusting in my government I, like millions of other Americans, had lost confidence in our leaders and was suspicious of the justice systems involving the FBI and CIA. My distrust and dislike spread even to the local police, who seemed to become more brutal and crooked each year...a dislike that most likely started when I was a child and watched my policeman uncle abuse my aunt and two cousins. I spent those 13 years being a wife and raising two children, but wishing I could have joined other young people as they made their way to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and to Woodstock and many points in between. I had wanted to go to Washington to protest the war, or to Selma, Alabama and join King in fighting racial injustice. My husband, who had been just as uninformed and naïve as I when we married, became more conservative and stiff during those 13 years, as I became increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo and became more liberal. Cracks that had emerged in the marriage during the years since 1958 became wider as he seemed to stand in place and I changed into an almost totally different person, until by the end of the 70s, a wide chasm stood between us...a chasm that was more and more often filled with dissatisfaction and resentment.
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