Dr. Ashenhurst.

I am pleased to introduce Dr. Jody Ashenhurst as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Dr. Ashenhurst grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and attended medical school at University of Illinois at Chicago. She trained in Internal Medicine at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital under renowned physician Dr. Quentin Young and credits him for teaching her as much about social activism as medicine. “Along the way I created some ‘good trouble’ myself,” she says with a smile. “Including helping organize a doctors’ union at Oak Forest Hospital.” After years of practicing Hematology/Oncology in various teaching hospitals in the Chicago area, Dr. Ashenhurst retired in 2017. She joined the memoir class I lead at The Admiral at the Lake in 2020 and generously agreed to let me share this essay with you — with the Senate Impeachment Trial going on this week, I assigned “Guilty” as a writing prompt.

Guilty

by Jody Ashenhurst, M.D.

I spent my internship and residency at Cook County Hospital and that required me to spend 3 separate months at the Cook County Jail. I was assigned to the Medicine ward at Cermak Memorial Hospital, the Jail’s small hospital.

Only a small proportion of the prisoners were serving sentences, and most of those sentences were under a year. The rest of the inmates at the Jail were awaiting trial. To see whether a prisoner was oriented to time and place, we would ask two questions: “When is your court date?” and “How much is your bond?” I never asked what a patient’s crime was. I knew that these men were not guilty, but they weren’t “not guilty,” either.

We met every morning to discuss problems that had arisen the day before, and then again at lunch. The food in the cafeteria was so horrible that Cook County Hospital sent over sandwiches of “mystery meat” for us. We were not sure whether we or the prisoners and employees had worse food for lunch.

My first day on the ward found me working alone, since my resident was in clinic back at the County. I went around the ward introducing myself and asking how my patients were feeling. As I was finishing up, I came across a burly, unshaven and bedraggled white man who looked up at me and said, “How would you feel if you found out you had killed your mother?” I learned that the Medicine ward occasionally took in some Psychiatry patients when their ward was full.

The nurses taught us to distinguish real from fake seizures. The radiologist only came for a couple of hours every morning but he taught us to read X-rays of facial bones so we could detect orbital fractures after fistfights. If there was something we couldn’t handle, such as chest pain, we could send the patient to County, but we had limited resources. Each prisoner at County was guarded by a sheriff’s police officer, which meant that the County Jail provided three officers for each prisoner, one per shift. There were a limited number of sheriff’s police available. We took great pride in sending very few patients to County, managing them in our jail hospital with limited resources: laboratory tests were unavailable after 7 pm and X-rays were unavailable after 11 pm, like in a small, very rural and unsophisticated hospital.

Because life on the ward was infinitely preferable to that in the tiers, the psychiatry patients found creative ways to get admitted to our little hospital. They seemed to know when a fresh batch of interns arrived to work at the Jail.

One guy was admitted for depression after his mother died. In fact, his mother died every month. Another fellow would be brought to the infirmary wearing tinted wire frame glasses while chewing on a broken light bulb. Crunch, crunch. The first time we panicked and admitted him to the hospital. After that we developed a routine: we had him rinse the broken glass out of his mouth and then subjected him to a very rough rectal examination. He would then be sent back to the tiers.

Were we a little bit sadistic with the rough rectal exam? Guilty as charged.

Luna and I posing in snowy Printers Row Park., That’s me in the red coat, Luna in the black coat.

Every winter here in Chicago I find myself questioning why it is that when snow plows clear passage for cars, the snow mounds they leave on curb cuts and crosswalks go unshoveled. What about the pedestrians? This article in Forbes says it well:

Plowing equipment exists that can clear sidewalks at least as efficiently as streets are cleared by conventional plows. College campuses and companies with large and complex facilities use them. But very few cities take full responsibility for clearing sidewalks the way they all do for clearing streets. And by and large, either taxpayers don’t want to fund it, or politicians don’t want to risk asking. So while some winter weather cities and towns are better than others for winter accessibility, very few do a genuinely good job of it.

Temperatures are hitting record lows (and are staying there) in many parts of the country this week. With so many people working or attending school classes from home due to COVID-19 regulations this winter, many Americans are spending less time in their cars and more time walking or bicycling outside. In our neighborhood, the city has plowed bike paths, but walking on snowy icy sidewalks to take short breaks from work, run errands, help neighbors, or just get exercise has been difficult. For friends who use wheelchairs, it’s been impossible.

We appreciate city services plowing the streets, but if they don’t clear the crosswalks, curb cuts and sidewalks , how can pedestrians get safely across to the other side? In addition to people with certain disabilities, other parts of the U.S. population do not drive, including:

• Children
• Many people age 65 or better
• Those who cannot afford a personal vehicle
• A growing number of people who simply choose not to drive.

Sidewalks and crosswalks are necessary for all of us who don’t drive. More from that Forbes article:

If this was purely a weather problem, then disabled people would have no choice but to endure, or somehow find a way to move to warmer climates. But winter weather accessibility barriers are also a policy and practice problem. Winter weather would be substantially less of a problem if cities and towns made it a higher priority.

Maybe we pedestrians all need to band together?? In the meantime, hang in there — it’s all gotta melt sometime.

A longer version of this post appeared on the Easterseals National blog earlier this week.

He should be featured in Goop.

Super bowl over

Brady male Gwyneth Paltrow

True sport baseball soon

I am pleased to feature Gabriela Freese as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Her parents immigrated from Germany to South America; she and her twin sister were born and raised in Paraguay, and Gabriela immigrated to Chicago in 1959, where she met her husband, a German immigrant.

Gabriela received a degree in dentistry from Loyola University in Chicago and had a practice in suburban Oak Park. After retiring, she moved to Admiral at the Lake in Chicago and has been in the memoir class I lead there ever since the class started. We meet via Zoom now, and when I assigned “Free at Last” as a writing prompt to honor Martin Luther King’s birthday last month, she came back with this beautiful essay.

by Gabriela Freese

It was the first time in my life that I got to watch someone draw their last breath. it was more like a sigh. Nine days in a deep coma were the last chapter in my husband’s life. It got very quiet in the room, no more rattling anxious breaths. We sat in wonder as we watched peace enter the room…and stay. Yes, he was now free, free at last. It was such a relief to witness this torture end.

I had been next to my husband for the nine days he was in a coma, spoke to him, and tried to comfort him. It is said that hearing is the last thing to go, although a reaction was no longer possible.

This was in 2010, and the passing of time has softened many of the sharp corners of those days. I cannot tell you how relieved I was when his torture was over.

Yes, he was free at last.

But was I free also? The toll that years of caregiving takes on the carer is huge. We chalk it up to having the energy to do more and more like we did when we were “young,” creating a deep emotional exhaustion that some people will never overcome and others, like me, had the strength to focus on other aspects of life that were totally out of reach before.

Still, going to the Symphony alone? A trip? Actually, quite wonderful. Nonetheless, it took me four years to settle back into my own person — thanks to support groups, friends and especially, my children that had to deal with the ups and downs of their own lives.

Susan Lane, a friend I had met in a support group, lived here at the Admiral and invited me to those great Sunday brunches where everyone enjoys the food and has a good time. That made my decision to move to the Admiral quite easy.

None of us expected a pandemic, of course, but friends of mine who still live on their own sometimes marvel at my stories. “Oh, the Admiral plans this for you?” they ask. “They do that for you?”

Hmmm.

When thinking of my own freedom from household chores and all that, I’m grateful, of course. But am even more grateful for what lies behind me.

Live and Learn? When I find myself in need of assurance, I look to friends and family around me. What lies ahead of me goes on forever.

Once upon a time, this was cutting edge technology.

At my first job after college, in the early 1980s, I used a typewriter. I worked at a fledgling non-profit magazine, so we didn’t have the Cadillac of typewriters—the IBM Selectric. Instead, we had salvaged, second hand stuff.

A few years later, working at the University of Illinois Office of Publications, I got an IBM PC with two floppy drives. One ran WordPerfect, the other was for the document files. Graphic designers gave us strict word counts based on the space afforded on their page dummies. We’d send the floppy with the WordPerfect files to a service bureau, who would then follow instructions from our designers regarding type face, size, column width, and son.

The designers would get back shiny typeset paper that they’d then paste onto their pages. If it didn’t fit, we writers would be told to cut X number of words. If there were problems due to our error, we fixed the WordPerfect file and sent it back for new typeset copy.

It was painstaking and laborious but…it enforced a discipline. Do overs literally cost money. We always strove to get everything just right the first time.

Enter Aldus Pagemaker and desktop publishing. Designers could set their own type, and fiddle with page design.

But.

The discipline that old process enforced vanished. The knowledge that it was easy to change a word or a photo at any time tempted some to constantly fiddle. Each fiddle introduced the possibility of creating new problems.

It also created a monster of sorts—the ability to use fonts, colors, and graphics—without any actual design ability. Really bad fliers and signs started popping up everywhere. At one restaurant in Urbana there were so many different desktop published placards and so many different colors and fonts that it would kill my appetite.

All that gave way to the Internet, where no document or article seems to be set in stone, to be final, and where it’s commonplace to find typos and other errors on the websites of major publications and organizations.

Of course, it’s all kind of wondrous. I mean everyone can have a web site, anyone (hey, look at me) can post a blog. And anyone can do a video or a podcast.

But probably not everyone should. Now get off my lawn!