Tag Archives: Parkinson’s

Single handing

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By Erik Dolson

Ferry servicer between Anacortes and Sidney B.C. was shutting down until late the first week in November. The boat needed to be in Friday Harbor around the beginning of the month. Weather looked good for a passage down the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Victoria. Time to go.

Engine checklist completed, I cranked over the engine. Oil pressure good. Temperature good. RPM smooth and good. Light gray smoke coming from the exhaust with the water.

Foxy’s a little over 13 feet wide. The slot between boats looked to be about 15 feet. I was pretty sure we could make it, but threading backwards required a little help, less than I was given, in fact.

“Don’t push! Don’t push!” I called out to the young man who thought he had to clear a boat by two feet when we only needed one. He leaped to the stern where the prop on my outboard hanging at the transom was about to dig a long groove in the side of his own boat. Damage averted.

In the harbor, I reminded myself of Roy’s advice: “Be deliberate.” I walked slowly to pull up and stow the fenders. I carefully wrapped mooring lines around the life lines. I walked slowly back, watching where I put each foot. I should have put Foxy in neutral, I realized. A stumble and fall overboard would have likely the same result here as out in the strait, unless I fell right in front of one of the little yellow water taxis buzzing about the harbor. The water is that cold.

Thoughts began to settle out in the straight, as did turmoil of last months. The unanswerable question: “How can you say you love me, and leave at the same time?” remained unanswered. I had no answer. But the volume receded even as I knew I had turned it up to ten, not Irish.

Oil pressure good. Engine temperature good. RPM good.

Life is not simple, for anyone. Sometimes I think there’s a dynamic balance between our capacity to organize versus the chaos we create just by living. Whether it’s the drunk  who struggles with the ATM machine, or me sitting silently in a patch of afternoon sun, or Irish, who referenced that “sinking feeling when you realize your life is a mess.”

The dinghy is secure. Hot coffee is in the pot up at the helm. Life jacket is at hand if I have to go forward. Fire Extinguisher. Tool kit. Oil pressure good. Engine temperature good. RPM good.

I gave her best care I could, so I thought. Physically. Spiritually. Financially. I knew it wasn’t enough, because I knew me. Of course I could see that in her eyes, too, though what I saw was pain because  I was unable to immerse myself in what we had, unwilling to change my priorities, to find a compromise that I didn’t believe in.

I told her I was toxic. She denied it but that made it worse because it said that I made this awful choice and could have chosen differently if I truly loved her.

There were no boats nearby. Large islands drifted slowly by. Tides were with me again, now twice in a row on a transit between the U.S. and Canada. The GPS showed nine knots, then over ten for a while as I rode the flood in from the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve not had Foxy out in the Pacific yet, and won’t consider myself a sailor until I do, with twenty foot waves or forty foot or even higher, hatches battened down, strapped by harness to jack lines, green water washing over the deck. Books and pans on the floor, maybe even having to heave to, sail opposite rudder, just to ride out the storm. That could well actually kill Irish, destroy her Parkinson’s weakened body, as if the boat and I had not come close enough already. May nausea of that shame mark me forever.

Recently I read that some choose to just tie everything down and go below during fierce storms, let them blow over, let the sea have her way, bob like a stick of wood if far enough out that a continent won’t get in the way. That’s something I should learn to do.

Flunking the test on fog, I untied from the mooring ball, everything looking good. I squirted across the channel to the dock where I wanted to tie up for a few weeks while some work is done. I heard no bellow from ferries in the fog, and kept a sharp eye out. Uneventful. Did good, I thought.

Ten minutes later I heard a ferry cross the track I’d just made. I heard it’s horn. I heard it’s engine. I damn near heard people talking on deck, but I couldn’t see its three story hulk 150 feet away, no further from me than it would have been had I been in its path without a radar reflector and the AIS for broadcasting my position sitting uninstalled on the desk below.

Hard to know what you don’t know.

But on the solo trip up the strait, I hadn’t had that experience yet. Then a long wake stretched out behind the boat, in a moment undisturbed by wind or wave, future or past. Oil pressure good. Engine temperature good. RPM good.

One step forward

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by Jane Miller

I didn’t really mean to write about all of this. Traveling over the Santiam Pass on New Year’s Eve, I wrote notes for something vastly different. But that will have to wait.

December needs to be revisited first.

I have been so afraid and so deeply sad. I lost my eye. I almost died. My face is still a mass of bruises, swelling, and pain. I will heal, I know, but there will be scars inside and out.

This past month keeps replaying itself in my memory. My world exploded on December 1 – a catastrophic fall on our sailboat. Four days later, Erik and I traveled painfully back to the States with the help of porters at every airport. Over the next two days, I saw my first eye doctor at the Casey Eye Institute and then a facial reconstruction ENT surgeon. It was decided to do a new ultrasound on my eye and operate on my face toward the end of December. The news that I could be looking at multiple surgeries was more than disheartening.

But Erik, being who he is, pushed to move the ultrasound up to December 15 to give us time to reevaluate should any new information come to light. We drove back over the pass to OHSU in a blizzard, avoiding an avalanche, to have the ultrasound. The technician, a brilliant and perceptive angel, noticed some issues with my eye.

We were ushered in to a meeting with the retinal surgeon who told us my eye was too damaged to save, that to leave it in could damage the other eye. We took time to breathe, think, and decide.

We put out an all-call on Facebook, and with a speed and love I never could have imagined, we began receiving support and help from all over the world.

A friend of Erik’s – a lovely woman he introduced me to in the line at the post office, and to whom I spoke for maybe 10 minutes – offered to put us in touch with a world-renowned retinologist. A member of our “racing family” introduced us to a professional who studied with my retinologist in England. My niece introduced me to a “friend of a friend” who had faced the traumatic loss of an eye. Just messaging her helped.

And the love and prayers that cascaded over us … from “wraparound hugs” to entreaties to call should I need anything … from friends I’d had since high school to my sorority sisters, from my family to my person to my brand new racing family … tears fall as I type this knowing I would not be here without you all.

I had my surgery on December 20, and after four days in the “ambulatory” surgical unit, Erik drove me back home. Getting over the pass was intensely painful, despite his best efforts. Christmas was saved by the presence and hugs of our children.

We went back over the pass to see my doctors on December 30, just a week and a half after they put my face back together. Details were revealed that the doctors had told me, I was just not coherent enough to fully realize.

The orbit of my right eye was broken in so many places, the facial reconstruction surgeon had to find a piece that was still attached to my skull and tie that one to the next and the next one to the next. The only comparison she can make is to a patient she had who fell five stories and landed on his face.

My right cheek was disintegrated to the extent they had to use a thicker titanium plate to rebuild it so it would hold shape. My right eye had literally exploded. My septum was deviated and the right side of my nose broken in pieces too many to count.

The injuries to my face were the kind associated with the head-on collisions of drunk drivers. Minor in comparison, I tend to forget the depressed skull fracture on my right temporal lobe.

I was stunned. “Jesus,” I thought, “how can this be so bad?” I lost an eye, but it’s more than that. The pain, the loss, the fear. I can’t write these words without tears. I don’t know why it wasn’t just enough to give me Parkinson’s.

I hadn’t believed them when they said the pain and bruising from this operation would be greater than the original accident. After they rebuilt my face from one incision in my mouth at the gum line and other incisions behind my eyelids, I learned they were right. My allergy to opioids caused wracking nausea and vomiting, making narcotics as brutal as suffering through the pain. After two days I retreated to Tylenol, Advil, and Excedrin.

The real news from the doctors was encouraging, though. My facial surgeon was pleased. My nose was straight, my cheek and orbit were holding shape. The surgeon who removed my eye said I’d made the right decision. The eye he removed was soft and not viable, the retina had disintegrated. He promised to give us the pathology report that accompanies surgery “to remove a limb.”

I cried in his office as the finality washed over me again. Erik held my knee and told me it was ok to cry, that I had to grieve.

But here I am now, December 31, New Year’s Eve, sitting on the couch in the Tree House in Sisters. There’s no dancing, but there is a love that will sustain us through bone-deep fatigue, pain and sorrow, and enable us to find joy in all things.

We are making plans to go back up to the boat soon, and still plan to sail to Alaska this summer.

So while I have many more rows to hoe, bones to mend, bruises to heal, and lessons to learn, I can begin my new year with tears for the trials of 2016, a sense of dread about the pain I still have to endure, but also gratitude for the love of family and friends, and the man who brought me home.

Second star to the right and straight on ‘till morning.