Catching Up on Me!

You may have noticed that I’ve sort of been on sabbatical the past little while.

I posted on Monday about the reason behind it (in part).

But let’s move past the drama and leave that in the workplace. Let’s talk about what has been going on since the last time we really spoke.

FITBIT/WALK: I’ve continued on my path of making sure I get my 10,000 steps in by using my FitBit. I absolutely love being able to track my activity. I’ve done as much as about 18k in a day and most days I make it to 10k. Because of physical limitations I’ve been not on my feet so much this week, but I should be back to normal soon.

My niece Mika also got a FitBit so we can push each other. She was doing really well for a bit but has slowed down (but she is 13, so, you know – a teenager) but I’m trying  to push her. She was beating me and I need the inspiration!  If you still aren’t my friend on there – I’d love to be FitBit Pals!

ANNIVERSARY: On April 26^th my husband and I celebrated our 1 Year Anniversary. We were able to take a day off and go on a short weekend getaway up the California Coast. If you follow me on Facebook you will have seen a ton of pictures. We went to Hearst Castle and lingered on the coast. We had both been before, but not for over 10-15 years. It’s a gorgeous place and the history is incredible. If you ever get the change I recommend it (even though it is a little pricey - $25 per tour and I think there are 2 or 3 in total). We also went to Morro Bay the next day and had a great time.  

I’ll write a post just on this because the weekend deserves its own attention.

MOTHER’s DAY: Thomas and I celebrated Mother’s Day the night before by taking our mommy’s to dinner at Flemmings. It was an interesting night. My mom doesn’t speak English and his doesn’t speak Spanish. My mom was not happy with the food – her meat with undercooked (she likes it well done). We complained and they took it back but when they brought it out again it was still red inside. One of the managers asked her how it was and when she said it was still red he said that if they cooked it more it would be burned. Umm. No. That’s only if you don’t know how to cook a steak well done.  We were able to talk to someone else, who spoke Spanish, who was able to remove the steak from her bill and give her a free dessert. Score for our bank account!

VOTE!: On May 19^th we had a small local election for school board. I have voted in every single election since I turned 18 and am happy to continue with that. Unfortunately the candidate I wanted didn’t win – but it’s the fact that I voted that counts.

May 21^st: On May 21^st it was a year since my sister passed away. I left work early and went to the cemetery with my parents and Jonathan (who was at their house at the time). It was a gorgeous day and it was nice to know that my sister is somewhere that is beautiful and that has such a great view.

NAILS: For the first time since before my wedding I went to get a mani/pedi with my mom. I had stopped going to save money because $27 every month seemed like a bit much. However I WAS paying $75/mo for a housekeeper, but her last month was December – so that’s a lot of money I’ve saved on that… and I’ve been doing it instead which means… I deserve this! It was nice to be pampered again. I decided on the pedicure at the last minute and that ended up being a good decision.

PICNIC: My niece has been planning Memorial Day picnic’s for the past 5 years (except last year since I was in Argentina on my Honeymoon at the time). This year we had it at a nice park in which she held it the first year as well.  And apparently I don’t learn my lessons. The first time we had it there in 2012 I was walking barefoot on the grass (what I always did when I was little) and stepped on a freaking bee. It stung me on my toe of my left foot. It got swollen and I got a nice little picture of it. Guess what happened this year!? Once again I stepped on a bee as I walked back from the ice cream truck (same thing as last time). This time it was smack in the middle of my right foot. The first day I was fine but the itching woke me up in the middle of the night. By Tuesday morning I could barely walk.  Luckily I brought back Caladryl from Argentina last year and that has helped, but again on Tuesday night I woke up twice with incredible itchiness! The area got more swollen and red through Wednesday but finally overnight into Thursday it finally started to get better.

I was walking on the side of my foot which now has left that painful. *sigh*

This is the reason why my steps have not been up to 10k this week.

So that is me for the past month or two! 

Happy Birthday Gabriela and Mika!

Yesterday was my mommy's birthday and today is both my sisters' and my nieces'. 

This is my sister as a little girl in my grandma/aunt's house in Argentina.

My sister would have been 43 today and my niece is 13! Finally a teenager! 

Sending them both so much love so that they have a wonderful day!

Facebook is Cruel and Crass

As most of you have probably seen on Facebook over the past couple of weeks – people have been posting a “year in review” collection of photos that Facebook itself put together and allowed each person to share or not on their page.

When I looked at mine and my mom’s… it wasn’t very interesting. Pictures of my wedding, my honeymoon, and the like.

Then, on Saturday, my brother calls me up. He asked if I had seen his post. I scrolled through my phone and found what he was referring to. He did a screen capture of what the year in review front page picture was for him.

I couldn’t believe it.

That is the last picture taken of my sister, only a couple of hours before she died. My dad by her side, saying his last goodbyes.

It was a crass thing to do. Even worse is that the day before they posted this to my brothers’ page, they apologized for doing similar things to others, including the father of a 6 year old who died earlier this year. If you apologize and realize something is wrong, why do you keep doing it?

My eldest sister, Margarita, did an amazing job at putting her feelings together. She wrote an amazing piece. I love reading her writing – she is simply amazing at it. I also love it because she shares memories that I don’t have. Memories of a time before me. You see, my sisters, and brother are over a decade older than me and lived a whole other life in Argentina.

It’s long, but it’s beautiful. It might not mean much to you, but it does for me. So much. If you read it, I truly do appreciate it. If you don’t, I understand.

Facebook Posts Photo of My Sister on her Deathbed – And Forces Me to Grieve

December 29, 2014 at 1:14 pm (Bad Companies, Memories, My World, Opinions)
Tags: Gabriela, Gladys, granny, La Plata

Last Friday, Facebook apologized to a grieving father for posting a “Year in Review” on his feed that featured his dead daughter.

Facebook’s “Year on Review” on my brother’s feed.

On Saturday, they posted this photo on my brother’s feed:

It’s a photo of our sister, Gabriela, agonizing on her death bed. She died later that day.

Gabriela got sick when she was 9 months old.  She got síndrome urémico hemolítico (hemolytic-uremic syndrome- HUS). I was almost four when this happened and I don’t remember ever not knowing those words. I didn’t know their meaning, of course, because at the time nobody did.  A syndrome, I was told, is a set of symptoms that go together without a known cause.  Now we know that HUS is most often caused by e-coli or another bacterial infection.  Not that it mattered, what mattered was that Gabriela got sick.

Ironically enough, I have rather good memories of the three months I spent living with aunt Gladys andGranny while Gabriela was at the hospital.  My aunt and grandmother doted on me, and I enjoyed the visits to the hospital.  The old, immense Hospital de Niños building was located in front of the Parque Saavedra, a huge park with a lake and plenty of green space.  Later, in fifth grade, I would come back here with my class to do a “study” of its ecosystem.  After every visit my aunt would buy me an ice cream bar.  Back then children were mostly put in large wards.  It was probably for that reason that, upon noticing that Gabriela was sick, my parents had taken her to the private Clínica del Niño.  The doctors there didn’t know what to do with her.  I’ve heard the story thousands of times: they kept filling her with serum while she couldn’t urinate until my father, worried, picked her up and took her against medical advice and without having her discharged, absconding with her to the public Hospital de Niños, where they saved her life.  HUS, you see, is a disease of poor children, the Clínica doctors hadn’t seen it before.  It was rare and worrisome enough, however, that my mother and Gabriela got the only single private room in the hospital.  Some years later, it’d be occupied by my cousin Fernando. Those memories are not in the least bittersweet.

I still remember, as well, the names of the doctors who saved her life back then and kept her alive afterwards: Silver and Rentería.  Their names would be replaced by others a few years later.   While Gabriela survived HUS, her kidneys were permanently damaged. By the age of six, they were giving out on her.

The three of us celebrating a doll’s birthday, c. 1978?

The CEMIC.  The Center for Medical Education and Clinical Investigations in the posh Palermo Chico neighborhood of Buenos Aires.  It became Gabriela’s home-away-from-home from the moment my parents found out about the possibility of a kidney transplant.  There were so many tests; my father had a different blood type; my brother and I were too young; my mother’s kidney was not fully compatible.  A German drug could work, perhaps, to bring down her immune system and prevent it from rejecting the kidney.  Working with the insurance companies to get them to import it and pay for it.  Getting Gabriela to gain weight so she could withstand the operation; getting my mother to lose weight to make it easier to take out her kidney.  My vacaciones the invierno, winter break, that year were spent in a nice apartment close to the calle Florida, in Buenos Aires.  It was owned by tío Héctor, one of my father’s college friends.  Mamá and Gabriela were in the hospital, papá working and visiting them, I was pretty much on my own.   I strolled the calle Florida, browsed at the toy stores and Harrods, ate the delicious pear jam that tío Héctor’s cousin was working to distribute. I visited Gabriela at the hospital some times.  She was in an isolation room, all by herself.  To enter, you had to cover your clothing, your head, your face and even your shoes.  You had to wash your hands with disinfectant and then put on gloves.  After her death, I discovered a letter I wrote to her while she was in the hospital, telling her about some little dolls I’d bought, advising her to be good to the doctors and nurses.

We celebrated Gabriela’s first transplant with an asado for doctors, patients and family members. 1979.

The rest, well, the rest is history. She got the transplant, a year later she started to reject it, two years later we had come to the US in search of a second kidney.  It would take a year, two at the most, and we’d be back home.  That’s what we thought.  Instead, it was six, and I was a sophomore in college by the time it came.  Before and after, well, there were health problems after health problems.  My freshman year in college I wrote a poem about her death, I don’t even remember what particular health crisis she was growing through then.  Peritonitis, convulsions, infections, my mom actually kept count of the hospitalizations, she’ll probably comment and say how many they were.  My mom was with her on every single one.  Every medical crisis presaged her death, but she didn’t die.  Then she lost her second transplanted kidney, around the time I was having my second child; she refused to go back on hemodialysis so we waited for her to die.  At the last minute, when the toxins in her brain were giving her painful hallucinations she consented to be treated, and there she went on until she had her third transplant, this time from a girl she met on the internet.  The Wall Street Journal even wrote about that(years later, my husband would also be featured on a WSJ front page story, on a completely different topic).

Throughout my life I have made my peace with Gabriela’s death so many times that when it finally happened, it came as an enormous surprise.   Truth be told, I believed she would outlive us all.  She gave proof to the adage that death comes like a thief in the night, when you least expect it.

My relationship with Gabriela had deteriorated over the years.  I loved her, I hope she knew that, but we clashed too much.  I won’t speak ill of the dead because it serves no purpose, so let’s just say we did not get along.   In part I was happy to say my last words to her after she died so she couldn’t talk back.  But I think she knew what I would tell her: that I always loved her with all my heart, that I had given her as much of me as I could give her and still remain a person, that I lived every day with the guilty of the unfairness and senselessness that she had been sick and I hadn’t been, that she didn’t get to live a full life, and I did.  As she laid dead, I spoke those words for myself, of course, but I also spoke them for her.

My family back in 1980, Gabriela is at the front.

But don’t get me wrong, while Gabriela and I were not close anymore, it’s in relative terms.  There is a closeness in my family which I think is very unlike  what I see in others, for better or worse.  When we were young and my brother and I would express jealousy about how much more attention my parents paid to Gabriela than to us, my mom would say that her children were like her fingers.  When one was injured, that’s the one she paid attention to, but the others were just as important and loved.  I think that the five + 1 of us (Kathy, my younger sister, was born two years before I left for college) are like fingers.  Too much part of a one to be individuals by ourselves.  I don’t think I can grieve for Gabriela without grieving for myself, for my brother or for my parents.

And thus we go back to Facebook’s ill-timed photo.   It didn’t appear on my feed, and for that I’m thankful, but it did appear on my brother’s. I understand why it did.  I come from a large family, with tons of aunts and uncles and cousins and second and third cousins.  Gabriela’s death was shared by everyone who lived her struggles.  They couldn’t be there in person, so they were virtually around her.  So they liked the photo, they commented on it, it was significant.  Which does not mean that seeing it again was welcomed.

My biggest issue was not that this photo was posted by facebook on my brother’s feed, he can deal with his own traumas, but that it was posted adorned with bright colored circles and squiggles that look balloons and garlands.  It’s a design that celebrates, that shows joy… at my sister’s agony and death.  How incredibly crass is that? How cruel?

It’s bad enough that they did it, but it’s worse that they did it with full knowledge of the pain this could cause.  After all, just like Friday they apologized for doing pretty much the same thing.  When you apologize for doing something wrong, you are supposed to change your behavior, not do it again and this time with happier designs!

Some good has come of this, for me.  I had been avoiding thinking about Gabriela this whole Xmas season, I didn’t want to break down and cry and I

have now done so, repeatedly, as I composed this post.  I didn’t want to think about the fact that next year, when my whole family comes to my house for Christmas, she won’t be with them, I didn’t want to think about how there is a finger missing from that hand now and it will never be reattached, but I know I did both of us a disservice by avoiding thinking about her.  I’m glad this forced me to and I can say Merry Christmas to the memory of that little girl that Gabriela was once upon a time.

Feliz Navidad, Gabriela!

Cliche Thankful Post

First off I want to wish everyone a fabulous Thanksgiving! 

I will be spending the morning making a fabulous leek tart (google it, it's amazing!) to take over to my in-law's. 

Their get together will be in the early afternoon and afterward Thomas and I will head over to dinner with my parents at Black Angus. They serve a traditional Thanksgiving meal as well as the whole menu. 

Which means soooo much food. Which started yesterday at work with honey baked ham, turkey, side dishes and the rest. 

I have a lot to be thankful this year. After all I got married and started the rest of my life with Thomas. I am healthy. I have my parents nearby and I get to see them often. I am thankful that they are around and healthy. I'm thankful to have 3 amazing nieces and an incredible nephew who are also healthy. 

I am also sad this Thanksgiving. My sister is not here with us and she will never be again. My parents are without their daughter and I know that their hearts ache with her loss. My heart aches for them. 

But even with our loss we have to be thankful for being here and together. 

Dash for Organ Donation

Some of you know that my sister, Gabriela, passed away on May 21^st of this year. After 3 kidney transplants and periods of years on dialysis since she was just 9 months, old she passed away due to intestinal blockages. 

My sisters’ first transplant was a kidney from my mom and her second was from a man who died in a motorcycle accident. The last, in 2007, was from a selfless, caring, amazing person who decided that she wanted to help save someone’s life by giving part of herself. 

Katie Welch, in her mid-twenties at the time, and my sister came into communication and Katie told my sister she would be willing to donate one of her kidneys to my sister out of the kindness of her heart. The word for this is altruistic. Not many people that I’ve encountered over the years know this word because there aren’t many people out there who truly are to the extent that Katie is. 

The kidney that Katie donated was strong and gave my sister 7 years of happiness. Seven years of extended life, of not having to go to dialysis three times a week. 

Now she is once again doing something so very kind. Katie will be participating in the Dash for Organ Donation in Alaska. She is raising money for Alaska Kidney Patients Association Inc.  on September 20^th. 

I know that we are all asked to donate money every time we turn around and that times are tough economically and we don’t all have much to spare. But if between now and the race in September you happen to have a few extra dollars ($1? $5? $10?) please consider donating it to Katie and the Alaska Kidney Patients. 

If you don’t personally know someone who is in need of an organ transplant you may not know the following facts:

• 18 people die daily while waiting for a transplant, 14 of which were waiting for a new kidney.
• 1 deceased organ donar can save up to 8 lives
• 122,737 (as of 5/21/14) men, women and children currently need organ transplants
• Of those 100,602 are waiting for a kidney transplant.
• Every 10 minutes a name is added to that list. 
• In 2014 there were 14,029 kidney transplants. 9,314 of those came from deceased donors and 4,715 came from living donors. 
• In 2014 there was only 1 unrelated anonymous donation (like my sisters’). 

Thank you for reading this. If you have a moment to share on your blog or tweet about this it would be incredible. 

It's not typical confessions... but I confess I would love for you to help!