Flint is NOT an Iron Lung

Fifties Iron Lung Ward, from Google


I was lying in bed one night in mid-December before the solstice, when the day’s supply of light was still miserably shrinking. It was cold. I’d turned the furnace down to 62, resolved to be an ecological grownup, and the heap of comforters on top of me was so heavy that I got an isometric workout every time I tried to turn over.

This was before the snow, the world outside the clamped-down window dark, impenetrable and forbidding. Those kinds of nights, silence and dark are the enemy: one’s thoughts turn dangerously to end games and angst.

I found myself mumbling, it’s like an iron lung in here. I’m trapped in an iron lung. Until when -- April?
Claustrophobia and dread puffed up like giant anxiety airbags, avoiding the crash but threatening their own sweaty suffocation.

This is the start of my next column for East Village Magazine. It'll be out Jan. 8. Oh what the hell, here's the rest of it.

I slid one hand out and reached for the radio. It’s designed with a little bump on the “sleep” button so you can find it in the dark. Hmm, 1:17 a.m. BBC as usual, all night every night. I wanted hypnotizing cricket scores, but this night it was all foreboding and fearful – a litany of bee disease, dying coral reefs, starvation, terrorism in the usual failing states.

Damn, I muttered, don’t they know we’re trying to fall asleep out here? Cussing, I rolled the old-fashioned dial to the MSU classical station. I landed just in time for a lullaby – an actual lullaby – by George Gershwin, who I’m sure had a few sleepless nights of his own. (I’m listening to it now – a nine-minute version by pianist Alicia Zizzo -- it’s lovely and I’m thankful.)

Then there was a nice long piece by Georg Telemann, who, the mellow-voiced announcer murmured, was more popular than his contemporary Mozart in their time. Hm, how about that, I thought. I relaxed, and before the 60 minutes of “sleep” radio ran out, my fretful brain surrendered to the music, and I slept.

The next day, I Googled “iron lung.”

With a tendency toward claustrophobia, I’ve always been horrified and fascinated by the iron lung. People my age well remember the tubular, wheezing contraption from the Fifties when polio paralyzed the bodies, including, cruelly, the breathing muscles, of thousands of kids.

Some of them were saved by the iron lung. According to Wikipedia, at the height of the polio outbreaks, “entire hospital wards were filled with rows of iron lungs,” the polio victims’ poor heads protruding from one end, sad little pillows under their necks, their hair splayed out and a system of disconsolate mirrors overhead. When you went to the movies, they’d show films of those awful wards, and then they’d pass around a can for donations to the March of Dimes.

Things you might not know: the machine was invented by Phillip Drinker and Louis Shaw (thus its earlier name, the Drinker Respirator) originally for treatment of coal gas poisoning. The first one was used in 1928 on a child in Boston.

Most of those polio victims died, but some lived a long, long time. The family of Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana donated his iron lung to the Centers for Disease Control museum after he died in 2003 after almost 50 years in it.

Martha Mason of Lattimore, North Carolina, died at 71 just last May after more than 60 years in her iron lung. She wrote a best-selling memoir about her life called Breath. After she contracted polio three days after her brother died from the disease, she says in a 2005 YouTube video, doctors put her in an iron lung and decreed she’d be dead in a year.

She asserted her curiosity saved her. From that breath-sustaining prison, she managed to get a degree in English from Wake Forest University (number one in her class). She went back to Lattimore where she read and wrote voraciously, welcomed many visitors and hosted dinner parties.

In fact, about 30 people in the U.S. still are encased in iron lungs, even though lighter, less restricting ventilators are available. A New York Times obituary(Mason Obituary) said Mason could have opted for a different kind of intubation in recent decades, but she chose her familiar iron house because of the freedom it gave her – “it let her breathe without tubes in her throat, incisions or hospital stays…it took no professional training to operate, letting her remain mistress of her own house, with just two aides assisting her.”

Mason’s story knocks me out. It chastens me: January in Flint isn’t really like an iron lung, and it’s an insult to those polio survivors to suggest so.

Their amazing resilience, in fact, inspires me. (Ahh, inspires -- from the Greek “to breathe.”) I can learn from them how to make each day, even the frozen-up January ones, fly by. I have choices.

I turned to Facebook once again to ask Flint friends for January strategies. The always-endearing Michael Absher said, “I swear a lot and kiss as many pretty girls as possible.” Gary Weisserman advised, “Burger@ the Torch.” Renee West smiley-faced, “anti-depressants.” Dennis Brownfield reported he walks his Jack Russell terrier in his winter coat down Woodlawn Park Drive after dark and enjoys the beautifully lit houses.

My friend Teddy says her alleviating secret is “happiness lights.” She keeps corners of the house brightly illuminated, trying to stay ahead of Dennis, her frugal man who keeps turning them off. I rely on color – my rainbow “postage-stamp” quilt cheers me up, and I’ve got a big poster of wildflowers framed above the bed. In January you’ll find me decked out in red, yellow, lavender and green – often all at the same time. Don’t mock me – it’s what keeps me from kicking the cats.

Whatever we do to get through January, it’s a compromise between sustaining cheer and respecting the Earth that tilts us toward dark to begin with. And that same earth will tilt us right out of the dark again, come spring.

In the meantime, I’m keeping my radio dial away from the BBC. And I’m very glad that I can breathe, on my own, even in the darkest winter days.

5 a.m. is getting better

A dear friend with expertise about sleeping explained to me lately that there's such a thing -- natural for people my age, and in winter -- called "second sleep." The idea is that you sleep deeply for a few hours of the night, then naturally wake up, get up and do some chores, and then go back to sleep when you're sleepy and enjoy a few more hours. Lately this seems to be working for me as I slowly recuperate from my long fall and winter when my body's immune system got so discombobulated and off balance. I am training myself in new habits, among them reframing the nature of my sleep routines.

There's a trick to it -- the creepiness of lying awake in some of the darkest hours, listening to the inventory of ghastly news on the BBC, and wondering endlessly "why I can't sleep" is replaced by something pleasant and, one could say, "normal." When I get up at 4 or 4:30 or 5 I microwave a glass of soy milk and sip it slowly, enjoying its calming warmth. I listen to the furnace. I sometimes check my email. I've written poems (perhaps this is how my friend Greg Rappleye came to call his wonderful blog "Sonnets at 4 a.m.") and worked away in little leisurely bursts at various projects.

And I've returned to bed when I'm ready, grateful for Ted's warm body. I'm lucky that my schedule allows me to sleep until 8:30 or so in the morning, so it's quite possible to get several solid hours of "second sleep."

I like this new routine, which takes the fear and angst out of not being able to sleep. Perhaps, in other words, there is a natural rhythm to it, and not simply an endless cycle of angst and despair. Looked at this way, 5 a.m. is not so bad. In fact, I am beginning to look forward to these quiet hours. Why should 5 a.m. have such a bad reputation?

Up Early

So, what are the benefits of sleeplessness? I've been up since about 5:30 a.m. -- and I'm NOT a morning person -- probably the side effect of the powerful antibiotic, Levaquin, I've been on for the past nine days. It's clearing up my two-month-long sinus infection, but has its cost. I'm grateful for this drug but really wouldn't mind a decent night's sleep. Before Levaquin, I'd also been having trouble sleeping, as I've amply noted here, partly due to recurring congestion and trouble breathing, and now I'm at least getting through the whole night (or whatever part of it I'm asleep) without producing a damp mountain of kleenex at my bedside. (The kind with Vicks and lotion is my favorite -- addictive comfort.)

In the meantime, is anybody else finding it almost impossible to listen to the news these days? Just a few of the items barraging the airwaves: more elephants being slaughtered for ivory, the Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy, the Baltimore Opera going bankrupt, a fiery jet crash killing three in San Diego, worsening strife in Zimbabwe as a cholera outbreak kills hundreds, workers sitting in at their factory at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, the housing crisis hitting hard in Nevada, the auto bailout triggering hours of hot air, jobless numbers abysmal, and snow and sleet predicted -- again -- for my neighborhood this bleak December day.

I find myself simply turning off the stream. Stepping out of the river. Clicked off the TV last night during the elephant segment: I couldn't stand one more second of the horror of the piles of immense, brutalized bodies. Turned off NPR during the Zimbabwe report, even though Jimmy Carter's voice -- the true Christian, one of an international group of peacemakers called "The Elders" on the scene -- provided momentary reassurance.

So, I ask myself, contemplating my wakeful healing process, what is good about all this?

First, of course, I am lucky there are drugs that help. And I'm especially lucky I have health insurance to help me buy them. I'm well aware others are left hanging out there, unable to afford care. Isn't it time our society figures out universal health care? (Note to readers: Watch Sicko again: the Brits, the Canadians, the French all get it...why are we so doggedly compassion-challenged?)

Second, it is good to be alert to the world. Morning Edition has been running a series called "American Moxie" and I find the stories inspiring and encouraging. It takes moxie to get through this life. A galvanizing reminder.

I'm reminded of a time in my life when, mired in emotional pain as I left my first marriage, I tried to get my therapist to prescribe me a tranquilizer. She refused, contending that in my case, I "needed to feel" what I was going through. I never forgot her infuriating wisdom. In that instance, I believe she was right, and I'm grateful she was there helping me navigate those rough seas. By paying attention, by letting my body and mind deeply experience all the grief and doubt, I somehow began to heal and hope.

But now it feels as if the whole earth is quaking with troubles, and I find myself muttering, damn, let's just prescribe anti-depressants for everybody: drugs all around, Prozac on the house!

But it's not a time for somnolence. We need to keep our wits about us, and like those employees refusing to leave Republic Door and Window, we need to stay put, stay the course, feel what we feel, and let our resilience and dignity and hope help us find a way forward, looking for the open doors, making new windows to fresh air and blue sky.

Through a crack in the heavy green curtains here in my sitting room, a space I cherish and which makes me very happy, I see light is beginning to break. Time to feed the cats and start the day.

What's Keeping Flintoids Awake?

Graphic by Patty Warner/Stix Design

Here's a sneak peek at my upcoming column in East Village Magazine. I'm indebted to John Sonnega, a sleep researcher at the University of Michigan - Flint. As you can see, I've been working out what this insomnia thing means since my own "sleep study."

Something is keeping us awake in Flint. Did you realize? Are you one of the ones who takes a pill, even a teensy one, to get yourself to sleep?

If so, you’re not alone. Here’s something to think about the next time you’re pacing the floor at 4 a.m.: according to a 2008 survey from the Prevention Research Center of Michigan, one in nine Genesee County residents reports trouble sleeping every single night, and a stunning one-third of us rate our sleep quality as “fair” or “poor.” On average, we pop pills to get to sleep three nights a week and, for our trouble, still manage an average of only 6.45 hours per night, less than the recommended seven.

In this, amazingly, our county is not so different from the rest of the country, though the City of Flint itself is somewhat worse off than our snoozier out-county neighbors. Whether the onset of the Obama administration or the re-opening at last of the Olympic Grill, with its happy cries of “Opa!” have calmed any insomniac fears has yet to be determined. But we still have, well, the Mayor, the collapse of Generous Motors, polluted brownfields by the acre, copper thieves plundering empty houses, and plunging 401ks.

And as a very good friend of mine recently said over the last dregs of a bottle of Bushmill’s, we’re all gonna die.

When UM- Flint professor and sleep researcher John Sonnega offered the above sleep results in a talk to one of my classes recently, I took the news personally. That very day, I was groggy from a virtually sleepless night, one of many; recovering from sinusitis, I’d had trouble breathing and imagined dark scenarios. My husband said I often up wake gasping and snorting, not exactly my image of myself as a middle-aged babe. Scary apnea, he confessed, had been going on awhile.

Prof. Sonnega said there were several sleep labs in town to study us bedraggled insomniacs. My doctor sympathized, and two weeks later, my symptoms not much improved, I reported at 10 p.m. for a “sleep study” at a hard-to-find Westside lab.

It was one of the first cold nights of the year, a Tuesday, the chill offering needed relief to this year’s allergy sufferers. For the past eight hours, as directed, I’d refrained from chocolate and caffeine. I’d packed a little bag with red flannel PJs and a toothbrush.

At the end of a long maze in the dim clinic, I saw I wasn't the only one. Three others sat on the edge of low-slung beds in other rooms, getting electrodes pasted onto anxious foreheads, chests, fingertips and calves.

The tech who tended me said she can't sleep either. She works 10 p.m to 6:30 a.m., and goes home and lies on the couch. She uses the CPAP machine, just like I might have to, depending on how I do. She looks forward to winter when the snow makes the world quiet; she lives by a school and the children make a lot of noise. At night while she's watching her subjects, she reads books and studies for a sleep certificate.

She was kind and friendly, but I have to say that lab was like a cheap motel: hard pillows, bad mattress, no art on the walls, thin bedspread. How could a person, wired up like a high-tech Shiva, fall asleep like this?

At least a TV had all the channels. The box of leads slung over my top, plastic air fork up my nose, I watched Jon Stewart interview an oddly unfunny Steve Martin. Then the tech came back, turned off the lights and left me alone.

I felt claustrophobic and a bit nauseous, watching an orange light blink on a plastic thimble on my thumb. It was strange knowing somebody was watching me, monitoring my vitals. In another room, somebody coughed, and coughed again. She's worse off than me, I thought.

I muttered my mantra, a string of trusty repetitions. And then, astonishingly, I fell asleep. The next thing I knew the tech woke me up and it was 6 a.m. She peeled off all the wires and I went home.

Insomnia, of course, is not just a physiological but a spiritual problem. In the tossing and turning, the body’s anxious refusal to do what it’s supposed to do, something fearful and irrational sweeps in. Often, I turn on NPR; all night, it’s the BBC. I used to like the voices, liquid and steady as a salmon run. But lately there’s too much Congo, Zimbabwe, Darfur: too much bloodshed and pain. Couldn’t they report just one little light-hearted feature about, say, a French accordionist? Or a placid potter in Rotterdam? A recipe for butternut squash? The sad litany morphs into despair: this poor old planet, I murmur, and then I lapse into fruitless loops.

If I lived right, wouldn’t I fall asleep like my cats, who stretch out blissfully? If I only knew what’s bothering me, what I need to resolve, could I sleep then? Or maybe it’s hormones, or what I ate, or what I drank? And thus the wheel goes round.

In the meantime, the trains kachunk-kachunk along the Court Street crossings; there are sirens, the morning paper drops on the doorstep, a good neighbor scrapes snow, two joggers pad down Maxine, chatting, as they always do, at precisely 5:58. I wonder if they sleep well.

I am trying to find the peace in this. I’m trying to figure out how to tell my frayed mind that all is well, that all will be well. But the deep unconscious, like the Loch Ness monster slicing back and forth in dark water, seems to know better.

I’m still waiting for my sleep study results. But at least now I know I’m not alone – for whatever reason, a third of you are out there too, waging a similar war. Prof. Sonnega’s research suggests that neighborhood factors like fear of crime might play a role in sleep – sobering results that say we need to work together on what happens after dark. There’s a plank to lay your head on: a good night’s sleep for us all, sleep like a honeyed drink whose only hangover is waking up feeling kind of good.

Awake after MIA

Yeah, yeah, I've been gone. Life is more important than blogging.

Last night I went to the Genesys Sleep Lab in West Flint for a so-called "sleep study," due to reports from my beloved that I was having occasional -- but scary -- apnea episodes. So I packed up my toothpaste and iPhone, donned my red flowered pajama pants and my Good Beans Cafe teeshirt (thanks StixDesign) and reported in.

Apparently a lot of people in Flint can't sleep. At the end of a long maze-like hallway in the dim afterhours clinic, I discovered I wasn't the only one. There were at least four of us last night getting electrodes pasted onto our anxious foreheads, chests, fingertips and calves.

The tech who tended me said she can't sleep either. She works 10 p.m to 6:30 a.m. every day, and goes home and sleeps through the day on the couch. She uses the CPAP machine, just like I might have to, depending on how I do. She looks forward to winter when the snow makes the world quieter; she lives close to a school and the children make a lot of noise. Sometimes she can sleep through it but not always. While she's watching the sleep subjects at work, she reads books and is studying for her sleep certificate. She was kind and friendly and was wearing a jaunty nurses uniform with Elvis Presley snapshots on it. "I couldn't believe it when he got married," she said, smiling. "My mom said, 'what did you think?'" She is 56 and remembers that moment vividly. She's been sleeping on the couch for six years, since her husband died. Back then she had to start her life all over.

I sort of started my life over at 50, too. The thought of that abandoned bed, empty from the funeral on -- a sad and poignant image. And understandable.

Lordy, the sleep lab felt like a cheap motel. Hard miserable pillows, a bad mattress, no art on the walls, a bedspread that looked like a reject from a hot pillow joint. How could a person, wired up like a weird Shiva, fall asleep like this? At least there was a TV with all the channels. The box of leads slung over my teeshirt, a plastic air fork in my nose, I watched Jon Stewart interview a strangely unfunny Steve Martin. Then the tech came back, turned off the lights and turned on the computer.

I felt momentarily claustrophobic and a bit nauseous, watching an orange light blink on the small plastic helmut on my thumb. It was strange thinking somebody would be watching me, listening to me, monitoring all my vitals, for the next six or seven hours. In another room, somebody coughed, and coughed again. She's worse off than me, I thought. I called Ted and said good night. It was our first night apart in Flint.

I muttered my mantra, a string of trusty repetitions, two syllables again and again, fighting off a wave of despair about my mysterious body, the way each of us is trapped in one body for life -- the same one, always the same and always changing, never quite telling the whole story. I appreciated the widow with the Elvis Presley tunic watching my heart rate and listening to my breathing and noting my brain waves, while slowly turning the pages to her sleep certificate textbook. it can take a lot to get through the night: last night, at least, neither of us was alone.

La Luna

My talented young webmaster Shane stopped by to pick something up just as the eclipse last night went into its full glory. He went home and caught the gorgeous lady above. What a relief to savor this beauty on a crisp winter night. Check out Shane's other handiwork at www.gramlingdesign.com. Check out Mother Nature's handiwork again tonight -- no eclipse, but another splendid moon.

Even with Trial Two on the melatonin (didn't stick in my throat this time) my body said "stay awake and watch the moon." It must be something primitive: keep the fire going, see what's happening in the sky. This apparently matters to my subconscious brain.

Tomorrow, full moon over the LA Harbor.

Enough Already, and a Soporific

His visage is sweet and loving and all that, but I've been informed enough is enough with the Mahareshi. I've been swamped and uninspired, probably half-suffocated by SAD...such an appropriate acronym. What a winter! Ten degrees this morning, with lovely, sparkling drips of ice growing down the screen of my big office window. I love this window.



This winter is reassuring, though: a short-term salve for worries about global warming. I keep wondering, is this the last hard winter of my life? I don't feel like complaining. Each day of hard freeze seems like a reprieve.

Trouble sleeping -- part deep-winter angst, part post-menopause, part too much work before LA -- and so yesterday I picked up a little brown vial of melatonin, 500 mcg. I tried melatonin in the 90s during a bad time of life, both parents and a dear friend dying, professional travails, and it worked well until my dreamlife turned on me with frightening nightmares. A dozen years on, I'm ready to try it again.

So I pop the little pill an hour before bedtime, and the damn thing gets stuck in my gullet. No matter how many times I swallow, I can feel it clinging to the left side of my esophagus. I make a cup of (consciously chosen) Sleepytime tea and gulp iit slowly; the bolus is still there, stuck. Who can fall asleep with that going on? Frustrated, I click "sleep" on my bedside radio and trust the monotonous midnight BBC will do the trick, and it does, even its catastrophic catalog about Kenya and Kosovo. At least this night there's news of Obama's latest wins, a remarkable momentum. Daring to hope for change, I finally fall asleep, my last-ditch melatonin eventually melting in my throat.