I’m submitting for publication
Thanks for traveling with me for thirty-one weeks as I published sample chapters of my new book on Kidney Disease, Timestamp: A CKD Memoir…
At present, there are forty-four chapters, and this is the end of the preview stage. I am now submitting the book for literary representation pursuant to traditional print publication.
To give the reader an idea of my process, I’m offering the new version of chapter one, below, so you can see how the book started as an outline, and is morphing into a more complete work…
Coming upI was born in San Francisco in August of 1967, the Summer of Love, and struggled with a significant number of minor ailments, and another that was more serious if not usually fatal.
Mount Zion Hospital was located on Divisadero near Post, and the lights in the city were just coming up as the nation’s TV screens were focused on the revelation of the identity of the one-armed man on David Janssen’s hit show, The Fugitive.
My dad had fled to Vietnam to escape the draft, but my grandmother was around, and she helped us out a lot. My mom watched the popular television show in the waiting room with a lot of nervous expectant fathers. I had already arrived, and she was on her own, as babies waited to go home from their perch in the hospitals’ nursery at that time, not with their moms.
Twenty-five years later, in March of 1993, I would be born again in the year the hit film version of The Fugitive was released. Harrison Ford was great in the title role, but it was Tommy Lee Jones’ character, Deputy US Marshal Samuel Gerard, that I loved the most.
Some people might have truck with the term born-again; I don’t expect everyone to agree with me or to endorse my statement, but I am going to speak my mind, and tell the reader where I’m at. This is my life, and I need to talk openly, but I don’t have an aggressive agenda for the reader, other than to share my journey honestly.
At the age of two, I was at Mount Zion again. There was a rustic lonely landscape painting beside my bed, and the staff suggested I enjoy it. I turned and stared at it with some fascination, and the doctor or the nurse stabbed me in the arm brutally. They’d wanted me to be distracted for the shot, and their strategy worked like a charm.
They were taking my blood samples to test me for allergies, and also diagnosed me with asthma. When the report came back, it was determined that I was allergic to dairy, citrus, tree nuts, wheat, wool, cat dander, down (and life itself?).
Mom put special sheets on my bed, kept the cats out of my bedroom, bought me expensive goat’s milk (which did not affect my breathing), replaced my down pillows with cotton ones, and generally tried to keep me in a bubble… we’ll, not really, but it sounds dramatic; she tried to keep me asthma free.
She made my pancakes with orange juice instead of milk, fed me nasty Marax pills to speed up my heart so that I could keep breathing, and generally cooked special dishes to keep me healthy.
When I was older, my sister even made me special pizzas with no dairy. She is an amazing cook, and the pies were delicious. Some people grow up with difficult family members, but we were a tight trio, on our own without a father provider, and we stuck close to each other, even when we clashed.
We struggled financially, emotionally and relationally in those years; I did anyway, but later, mom would meet my step-dad, and things looked up. I had no idea that decades later, I’d be diagnosed with chronic kidney disease…
We relocated to Canada in 1975 to be near my dad, but he had moved on from our family, and the man who would become mom’s second husband cycled from Berkeley to Vancouver BC to see us.
I thought this was a superhuman thing to do. Colin was his name. He showed me a two inch square silver bag, saying it unfolded into a full sleeping bag, and told me that when he rested along the way, he just expanded the bag and lay down in a sheltered area. I guess today, that would be dangerous, but it was a different time back then.
He drove us back to the USA after we’d been in Vancouver for six months, and we lived in two rentals in Berkeley and a home in West Berkeley. I dealt with my asthma, but most other things about life seemed fairly normal. We weren’t well off, but never went hungry… and there was peace and love in our household, whereas my mom had known violence in the home growing up. I am always grateful that I had a peaceful and loving upbringing.
We moved to New Mexico in 1987, for various reasons, having nothing to do with me. I was happy in Berkeley, and felt somewhat uprooted, but I was very social back then, and I made new friends quickly, adapting to my new environment, and getting some decent jobs.
I did an asthma study at the Veterans hospital, and made about two hundred and fifty bucks, but the climate was so dry, that when I left to become a big movie star in New York (that was my dream anyway), I tried to fund part of my expenses for the journey, with another asthma study, but the hospital turned me down: my lungs were 100% clear!
So I grew up in Berkeley and Albuquerque, mostly. My mom was a book buyer and librarian, and is now retired and living in California. My stepdad died in 1994, but was a carpenter and cabinet maker who quit Cal Berkeley before giving his doctoral dissertation when his first marriage went bad.
His degree would have been in the Latin Classics, and when he phased out the carpentry that sustained, he returned to school as a substitute teacher.
My dad passed away in 2010, but was not a part of my childhood or teen years. I made peace with him, and appreciate the amends he made.
I went to Berkeley schools, but dropped out of the tenth grade and my mom said I’d have to work, so my work ethic was forged in my mid-teens, and remains active today.
My only health issues as a kid were bad dandruff, acne, bad asthma and insomnia. I was also addicted to food, and lingered too long in boyish fantasies about females.
To try and cure the dandruff, I tried Head & Shoulders, Denorex, Selsun Blue, Neutrogena, Nizoral, TeaTree, and many more, but none of them worked a bit.
Now that my wife found Dermarest brand shampoo for me, and since she also keeps me from eating a lot of fatty and salty foods, my dandruff is seldom an issue.
For the first ime in my life, in my 50’s, I have a 99% clear scalp. If you’ve ever struggled with bad crusty junk at the roots of your hair, you know what a drag that is.
I also had bad zits, but I overcame those too. I guess getting out of puberty helped, but I consulted with my grandmother about it one time. Rather, I probably complained to her about it. She grew up during the great depression, and probably felt there was a cheap solution to many ills. She simply told me to stop touching my face.
I am a stubborn person, but also sometimes very suggestible, and I took her advice; I stopped touching my face, and all my acne went away for good. I’ve had very little acne since that time.
The asthma was a harder nut to crack, and I had to take medicines such as Marax (as mentioned) and Theodur. When I had bad attacks, Primatene Mist was a joke (it might have worked for some but not for me), and eventually, when it was apparent my breathing was not clearing up, my parents would take me to Oakland Children’s Hospital, where they’d put me on a nebulizer, which always cleared up my lungs and restored easy breathing.
If you’ve never had an asthma attack, you might think being grateful for breathing was weird, but believe me, it’s like manna from Heaven, and the kind that the Israelites had not yet tired of.
My mom used all manner of techniques to help me through my asthma, from weaning me on to a lifetime habit of drinking hot tea, to crushing the bitter nasty Marax (that I’d talked about) over my food to get me to take it. She employed a humidifier to try and keep my lungs open, but as I mentioned, when we moved from California to New Mexico, it was the dry air that cured me.
I was ecstatic, but the doctor or nurse said to remember that the asthma was likely to recur when I got older. That did eventually happen, but so far, in my fifties, the meds are better, the inhalers are way better, and my asthma has never been as bad as in my early teens in Berkeley. Hopefully that will continue.
The insomnia was blamed (by me) on my asthma meds. They were designed, at least in part, to speed up my heart, easing my lungs labor. As a result, or so I thought, I could not sleep until the wee hours of the morning. That did not work well with my sin struggles, and it did not work well with school.
I’d get to school dead tired (if I even went), and between being groggy as all get out. My boyish nighttime habit was not helping either.
Later in life, I got to know my real dad, and while he helped to ruin the first half of my life, he did make a strong attempt to make it up in his second half. One thing I learned about him was that he couldn’t sleep at night. He went to bed in the middle of the night, and got up around midday.
So maybe my theory of the asthma meds being the culprit was incorrect.
Over some of my health issues, in Albuquerque, I worked at some retrospective art house theaters, in carbon arc cinema projection, and also did restaurant work and sold art supplies at a retail store.
On moving to New York, I studied theater, and performed in a significant experimental Shakespeare production, among other exploits in the field of drama.
During my New York years, I earned most pay waiting tables and managing a café. When the café was held up by a gunman, I handled the situation with calm and efficiency, but later had a nervous breakdown.
This was to be one of the worst health issues I’d ever experienced.
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“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” — Proverbs 22:6
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