People have been asking if Whitney stayed with me while I was in the hospital last week.

She did not.

That’s Greg with his and Lois’ dogs Gamma and Griffin.

Legally, I could have had her in the room with me — Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act allows those of us who rely on service dogs to have them along in hospital rooms. All bets are off, however, if the dog constitutes either a “fundamental alteration of goods and services available for all” or a “direct threat to safety.” So while Whitney could have legally sat at my bedside once I was recovering in a regular hospital room, she would not have been allowed while I was in ICU. She wouldn’t have been with me in any sterile rooms (such as the operating room). Certain areas of the emergency room/departments would have been forbidden, and she wouldn’t have been able to ride in the ambulance with me to the hospital in the first place — even Mike had to follow behind in a cab.

Hospital staff cannot be made responsible for caring for a service dog while a patient with a disability is in the hospital, and I’m afraid my case left doctors and nurses with bigger problems to solve than figuring out when and where to take Whitney out to pee. The truth is, we never even thought of asking my Seeing Eye dog to sit still and behave at my hospital bedside while I recovered. It wouldn’t have been fair to an energetic ball of fur like her. I didn’t need her to guide me anywhere, and she would have been bored out of her mind.

Our dear friend Greg Schafer rushed to the waiting room after cardiologists recommended Mike call a friend to be there with him while I was being operated on. After surgery was over, Greg offered to stop by our apartment and fetch Whitney, take her home with with him for a few days. Greg and his wife Lois have a huge yard with two dogs and all sorts of other critters. Whitney spent the weekend there tracking deer and enjoying long walks while Mike spent time helping me recover at Northwestern Hospital.

Greg and Lois returned Whitney to Chicago on Sunday. After getting her settled in our apartment, they stopped by the hospital to regale Mike and me with details of ways Whitney spent time with their own beautiful dogs, Griffin and Gamma. Their stories really cheered me up. Whitney was there to greet Mike at home that night, and she was at the door waiting for me when I finally returned home Tuesday. A joyful reunion for sure.

That’s Whit wearing her Gentle Leader.

Surgeons had to cut my sternum to perform open-heart surgery, and until that bone heals I can’t let Whitney wear a harness and pull me. Trainers at the Seeing eye have dealt with graduates who have had open-heart surgery before. Until my sternum heals, they recommend I have Whitney wear a Gentle Leader, a collar designed to gently discourage dogs from pulling while walking on a leash. Mike comes along on my walks with Whitney, and each day the length of our cardio walks expands a minute or two. Neighbors are getting used to seeing me sauntering down the block with Whitney on my left, Mike on my right: a heart-healthy sandwich.

Friends have been volunteering to take Whitney on faster walks every day too, to keep her in shape. Others fill in for Mike when he isn’t available to take me on the slower-paced walks. Between these volunteer walkers, the friend who brought her violin over to perform for me, the ones who have sent or delivered food, friends who have sent cards and music CDs and concert tickets and audio books and get-well bracelets and a lounging gown and body lotion and flowers and gift cards and whew, you’ve all been so kind I need to stop here to take a breath before I go on: my lungs aren’t back to normal quite yet!

Pause.

Okay, I’m back. Thanks to all of those friends and all of you blog readers who have left such encouraging comments here on the blog, I feel loved, and I feel grateful. I’m alive, and I’m healing. And I’m looking forward to getting on the road again with Whitney.

Mike chauffeured me home on Tuesday.

Listening to Mike read all your loving and glowing blog comments out loud to me in my hospital room over the past week sometimes gave me the feeling I was attending my own funeral. Doctors did have to shock my heart back to work last Thursday, so it was kind of like that. But I’m still here, and I’m more grateful than ever for my wonderful friends and family.

I am a lucky girl.

Turns out the cardiac surgeon who happened to be on hand to do my emergency open-heart repair job last week is one of the top cardiac surgeons in the United States. Patrick McCarthy came to Northwestern Memorial Hospital via the Cleveland Clinic. And a Couple nights ago, he came to my hospital room to introduce himself and see the miracle girl sitting up in a chair and talking. The benign tumors he’d removed were like a sea anemone, he said. “It was flapping around your aortic valve and attaching itself here and there for a while, and then flapping around again.” He’s done over ten thousand heart surgeries and has seen a benign tumor on the aortic valve a few times before. Never one this big, though. He said it was as big as a marble.

The famous doctor sounded very pleased to have a photo of the tumor he could send to the cardiologist who’d had me ambulanced here last Wednesday. “It really is very exciting.” Considering the outcome, I had to agree.

Mike and I both thanked Dr. McCarthy profusely before he left the room , of course, and I told him surviving all this has given me a lot to ponder. As we shook hands to say goodbye, I jokingly asked if he thought I should join a religious cult now and move to an underdeveloped country to help people less fortunate. Dr. McCarthy didn’t bat an eye. “No,” he said. “I think you should buy a lottery ticket.”

Wedding day, July 28, 1984. Thanks to some terrific people, me and the miracle girl can look forward to another anniversary. (Photo by Rick Amodt.)

Hello everyone. It’s still me filling in for Beth. She’s home — from Vermont, anyway — but a funny thing happened on her way back to the blog. Many of you already know the story — for those who are reading it for the first time, apologies for the scare. But Beth and I pieced together the following account because we thought you’d want to know. We’re still sorting some things out, so don’t be surprised if we don’t respond right away. Thank you for reading—Mike

Beth had emergency open-heart surgery Thursday morning, and she is OK. More than OK. She’s recovering remarkably well, crazy remarkably well, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I just left her room. She is walking the hallways, with a guide, and still attached to surgical drains.

The docs and staff who got her to this point have been streaming through over the past couple days and they all come through Beth’s hospital room door saying, in a tone of amazement, “I just wanted to lay eyes on the miracle girl.”

For the past two weeks, starting when Beth was still in Vermont, she had been experiencing infrequent burning sensations, followed by pain in her chest. Our friend Debbie Wood had a heart attack in her 40s. Debbie works at Northwestern University and by chance was involved in the design project Beth worked on there last month. During that time, Debbie reminded Beth to see a doctor if she ever had any chest pain. “Women tend to ignore them,” she warned. “It could be serious.”

Friends from New Hampshire drove to Vermont and brought Beth to the Burlington airport and she flew home, earlier than planned, to me. At home, her pains seemed to increase in frequency. But they didn’t fit the description of angina – no swelling in the ankles, no lightheadedness, and the pain didn’t spread into her arms or back. Rather than go to the ER, we had our endocrinologist get Beth in for an appointment for a stress test/echocardiogram last Wednesday afternoon at a downtown cardiologist’s office.

That’s when the sh-t hit the fan. Beth had what was technically a heart attack while she was on the treadmill. A Chicago EMS crew rushed Beth to the Northwestern Emergency Room in an ambulance. Followed by me in a cab.

Her angiogram the next morning showed, against all reasonable expectations for someone who’d been diabetic 47 years, that Beth’s arteries were clear. When the cardiologist came from the cardiac catheterization lab to brief me, she said, “Dude, I hope my arteries are that clean when I’m 54.” Which sounded like good news. Except it still left them not knowing what the problem was. And that’s when Beth’s heart went into fibrillation. They had to shock it back into rhythm.  No time to spare now. No decision , either. Open heart surgery.

A dozen staff frantically prepped her for surgery, like a scene out of House. When the anesthesiologist came with release papers for me to sign, and just before they wheeled her away, he said, “ She’s unstable. We’re going to do the best we can do.”

It was only on the operating table that they solved the puzzle — why she had been experiencing chest pains over the past couple weeks. We worried that it had something to do with that staph infection she’d gotten back in Vermont. Or coronary artery disease, which diabetics are more susceptible to than the general population. But no. They’d found — and removed — three benign tumors on Beth’s aortic valve. Such tumors are uncommon. But Beth was, as is her wont, one-of-a-kind. In the surgeon’s words, “I’ve done 10,000 operations and I’ll tell you — one of these tumors was the biggest I’ve ever seen. It’s more than a centimeter.”

He explained that the tumors flapped when Beth’s valve opened and closed. And one of them, the big SOB tumor, intermittently cut off blood flow to Beth’s heart. Leaving her with a burning sensation followed by pain in her chest.

And so, through the combination of some good decisions, some absolutely terrific, wonderful, heroic medical staff at Northwestern Hospital, the good wishes and support of our wonderful friends and family, and, some simple good luck, Beth will be coming home to me again early this week.

Beth will be coming home to the blog eventually, too, and I probably will do a post or two on the subject. There are people to thank, wonderful friends, family members, and complete strangers. And probably a lot of thoughts to be sorted out via writing.

Until then, please, take care of yourselves, and each other.

Hi folks–it’s still Mike here, Beth will be back on the job soon. Meantime, thought I’d share a letter of appreciation she wrote to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded her stay at the Vermont Studio Center — it gives a pretty nice summary of her time there. 

April 19, 2013

That’s us in Johnson, Vt., just outside my studio. Photo by Susie Cronin.

Dear National Endowment for the Arts,

I am writing from the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) to thank you for awarding me a Creative Access fellowship. My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I have been here a month now, and it’s been a privilege to share ideas with the 50 other poets, writers and visual artists who have come here from all over the world to work on their own projects.

It has also been a privilege to devote time to my writing in the quiet living and studio space the Vermont Studio Center provides. I take breaks from time to time, too: three times a day my clever three-year-old Labrador/Golden Retriever Whitney leads me down a path from our writing studio, over a river, across a highway, and up to the Red Mill building for meals. Trust me, the chef and his staff here make it well worth the journey! Sharing those lovely meals with Vermont Studio Center staff and resident poets and visual artists is a joy, and listening to their stories has expanded my appreciation for the arts.

Vermont Studio Center runs an ongoing arts program with Johnson Elementary School, and Whitney and I spent a lively afternoon there sharing my children’s book and answering questions about writing and what it’s like to be blind and work with a guide dog. VSC also sponsors lectures by residents for the community, and their reading resident night gave me an opportunity to try out new assistive technology with a friendly audience. The technology worked, and that success will encourage me to try it out at the talks I give at libraries, schools and other civic organizations when I get back to Chicago.

I lost my sight when I was 26 years old and took to writing after that. Over the years hard work, supportive friends and family, and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act have combined to help me create a busy, fulfilling life.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have two books published, I have a part-time job moderating a blog for Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago, I write and record essays for Chicago Public Radio, I speak at schools and conferences about blindness and guide dogs, and I teach three memoir-writing classes for Chicago senior citizens every week.

I’ve been thinking about writing a book about all I’ve learned from the writers in these classes, and now, thanks to this Creative Access fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’ve started writing that book. In one month at the Vermont Studio Center I’ve accomplished far more than I ever could have in my busy life in Chicago, and I’ve developed some good writing habits I plan to take home with me as well.

It has been a real privilege spending every day here in a quiet studio space. I am composing this note from my usual perch here: a cozy chair right by the window. From time to time I take a break, turn off my talking computer and open the window so Whitney and I can stick our noses out and enjoy the fresh air and listen to the river rush by outside. I’m black and blue from pinching myself so much.

Thank you, National Endowment for the Arts, for awarding me the Creative Access fellowship. Look for a copy of my new book in the mail once it gets published!

Yours,

Beth Finke

Some week, huh?

Well, luckily, defying logic, life goes on. Here’s how life has been going on in the Finke-Knezovich worlds of late:

• Beth and Whitney have been on a roll since their staph-infected first few days at the Vermont Studio Center. Beth says she’s getting a lot done, that Whitney seems to be mellowing in accordance with the more pastoral pace and setting. And Beth says the food at VSC is terrific.
  
• While in Urbana this week, I had a great lunch of Thai food with Jean Thompson. Beth has written here at the blog about Jean, our dear, one-of-a-kind friend. Jean was a mentor to Beth while Beth worked at writing and publishing “Long Time, No See.” Jean’s a spookily talented writer who gets into characters’ heads and lays them open to readers like no one else. During her teaching career at the University of Illinois, Jean produced a highly regarded body of short-story collections and novels. One of the collections, Who Do You Love, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Well, since retiring from the academic world, she’s been producing more great work than ever. Her latest — The Humanity Project — just received a thoughtful and glowing review at the New York Times. If you’re a reader, go out and get it, or anything by Jean.
• Roger Ebert is dead. Long Live Ebertfest. My friend Brand Fortner, whose daughter contributed a guest post here about her father’s adoration for Ebert, is at this year’s Ebertfest in Champaign in the newly, grandly renovated historic Virginia Theater. Another Urbana friend—Steven Bentz, of Steven and Nancy—who adopted Hanni, is director of the Virginia, and has been working heroically  to ensure the theater was ready after months of work.
• There are some nice things about being a bachelor for a few weeks. Utter spontaneity is one. A week or two ago, on a Sunday night, I was restless. I’d heard that pianist Eric Reed and his trio was putting on a great Thelonious Monk-themed show at Jazz Showcase. I looked up at the clock, which read 7:30. I closed my computer, I put on my coat, and walked the two blocks to the Showcase. Walked in, bought a ticket, sat down, and enjoyed a sublime set. Sometimes, life is just good.
• I just learned that thanks to the good people who care for our son Gus up at Bethesda Lutheran Communities in Watertown, Wis., Gus will be getting an hour-long joy ride this summer — in either an open-top vintage car or…a sidecar on a motorcycle! (I love motorcycles, and based on how much he enjoyed riding in our bicycle trailer, I think Gus would love either the sidecar or the antique auto).

Happy birthday Flo.

Best of all: Tomorrow, April 20, Flo — Beth’s evergreen mother — turns 97 years old. She’s still living in her own place, and her face lights up about any number of simple pleasures.

Happy 97^th Flo.