I threw my wedding ring into the river today

down

down

down

into the Allegheny it sank

To the bottom where there is

no light.

we met on a river

got engaged by a river

lived by a river

moved and made a home by another river

this river.

In a river we were born and

in a river today we died.

He tried to pull me

down

down

down

to a place where there is

no light.

But I broke free and swam

up

up

up

to the light.

you tried to starve the light in me

you’re still in darkness, I am free

I am not yours, you are not mine

these waters broke the tie that binds

I am not yours, you are not mine

these waters broke the tie that binds

I am not yours, you are not mine

these waters broke the tie that binds

So mote it be

Tears and the ocean both being salt water is not

an accident.

Tears met with comfort release our pain

and

connect us to one another.

For a moment we are weightless,

surrounded by the warm salty water of the Womb.

Floating

Beneath the surface, the sounds fall away

(There is only Her heartbeat)

The salt stings our eyes and we must close them now

and wipe away the salt water.

Emerging from the warmth into

the bright light of the Sun,

the cool air moving past us,

the noise of ordinary life around us.

(the tears dry,

their molecules moving into the air, into the sky, to the clouds

to be returned again to the rain, to the ocean)

We are renewed now.

Released.

Returned a little closer to who we were

before we left the safety of the ocean we all began in.

And knowing this is one to which we can return

again

I recently asked a patient how their Mother’s Day had been and they replied, not good. Their mother had found out her partner had been slowly poisoning her. I asked them if this person seemed the poisoning type, any history of violence or mental illness? No, they responded. It was a total shock. And I thought to myself, why would someone poison their spouse instead of just divorcing them? And then I thought about what divorce is like and I wasn’t as stumped.

My friend told me about a prominent pastor who’d slowly poisoned his wife and made it appear as though she had a terrible chronic disease so he could garner attention and sympathy (narcissist much?). Another friend related to me a tale of a man who had poisoned his wife (by slipping it into her prenatal vitamins) right before she got into her car, hoping to make it look like a car accident but the poison kicked in too quickly and he was caught.

And then a friend told me the tale of Aqua Tofana.

Giulia Tafana lived in 17th century Italy. She made cosmetics and holy oils for women by trade. But, she also helped over 600 women kill their husbands with a poison she made called Aqua Tofana. She succeeded for decades but in 1659 she and her daughter Girolama Spara were put to death for their crimes. Well, by one account anyway. Another has Tofana dying peacefully of old age and her daughter taking over the family business.

Spara operated as a kind of “cunning woman” who sold charms and cures to the gentlewomen and nobility of Rome. These activities would not only have introduced her to potential customers, but would also have given her a shrewd idea of which of her clients were happy in their marriages and which unhappy – not to mention which might be desperate enough to seek drastic remedies, and be able to keep a secret.

The thing to keep in mind is that in 17th century Europe, women had no rights. Your husband could beat and rape you as much as he pleased. Your father could pick your husband for you. Women had very little control over their lives and divorce was not a thing back then. What was a girl to do? Giulia Tofana had the answer.

Aqua Tofana was a unique poison. It was colorless and flavorless and only 4 drops was enough to kill a man (or, as the primmer source goes, “sufficient to destroy a man”). The wife would put the first drop in his food or wine and he would feel a bit off, a bit tired. Then in a a day or two she would slip him the second drop and he’d feel worse. By the third drop, he was vomiting and diarrheaing all over the place (which she probably had to clean up) and calling for the priest. And the final drop did him in.

Administered in wine or tea or some other liquid by the flattering traitress, [it] produced but a scarcely noticeable effect; the husband became a little out of sorts, felt weak and languid, so little indisposed that he would scarcely call in a medical man…. After the second dose of poison, this weakness and languor became more pronounced… The beautiful Medea who expressed so much anxiety for her husband’s indisposition would scarcely be an object of suspicion, and perhaps would prepare her husband’s food, as prescribed by the doctor, with her own fair hands. In this way the third drop would be administered, and would prostrate even the most vigorous man. The doctor would be completely puzzled to see that the apparently simple ailment did not surrender to his drugs, and while he would be still in the dark as to its nature, other doses would be given, until at length death would claim the victim for its own…

To save her fair fame, the wife would demand a post-mortem examination. Result, nothing — except that the woman was able to pose as a slandered innocent, and then it would be remembered that her husband died without either pain, inflammation, fever, or spasms. If, after this, the woman within a year or two formed a now connection, nobody could blame her; for, everything considered, it would be a sore trial for her to continue to bear the name of a man whose relatives had accused her of poisoning him.

She initially disguised it as cosmetics but soon moved to hiding it in holy oil bottles marked Manna of St. Nicholas of Barri. This was appropriate because a priest, Father Girolama, was getting them their supplies. (A crooked priest??? Shocking, I know, but it’s true). It was also appropriate because what gal doesn’t want jolly old St. Nick bringing her some Aqua Tofana? Slip a bottle of that potion under my tree, Santa!

We don’t know if any of this is true, of course. The witch hunts were still going in the 17th century as part of a broad and violent effort to suppress female healers, midwives, artisans and craftspeople. Maria Mies refers to this process as Housewiferization . European women were being removed from the public sphere and confined to the private sphere of the home. It’s possible the tale of Aqua Tofana is entirely a result of the times. But I think most women would like to think it’s true. Not because we’re homicidal, but because, well, patriarchy sucks. Being powerless sucks. Why shouldn’t those 17th century men have at least been a little afraid their wife might poison them if they treated her like shit?

We don’t have to poison our husbands these days. We can just divorce them. There’s less vomit to clean up. But it doesn’t make nearly as good a story.

Sources:

https://mikedashhistory.com/2015/04/06/aqua-tofana-slow-poisoning-and-husband-killing-in-17th-century-italy/

View at Medium.com

One year ago today I woke up to my four year old climbing into bed with me, crying, with a barking cough and feeling like he was a million degrees, telling me his throat hurt. It took a minute for me to realize I felt the same way. By the next day, the whole household, all five of us, had a fever. I’d begun tracking all our temps twice daily on March 13th, when the schools shut down and the seriousness of this virus started really hitting me. On Sunday the 15th my oldest son had a low fever of 100.4 but felt fine. It went away a day later and I chalked it up to a sinus infection. I think he was probably patient zero at our house but it could have been a fluke. We’ll never know. It seems likely we got it before lockdown began. Once it had begun, we followed the rules very strictly (although I did go grocery shopping once and no one was masking back then).

When he came into my room, with his barking, croupy cough, I knew it was COVID. I just knew. COVID, as far as we knew, was still barely in Pittsburgh (we were wrong). It was new enough that new cases were reported on the news. There was one at the Oakmont Sheetz as I recall shortly after we got sick. I remember telling people I thought we had COVID and their skepticism. “I don’t know anyone with COVID,” they’d say, as though they were the Universe. “Well, it’s a pandemic, so someone has to have it. And a lot of us are going to get it by the time it’s done.” To be sick and face invalidation is difficult. It’s hard enough being sicker than you’ve ever felt while having four sick kids while working from your closet while in total isolation without that exacerbating things.

We were lucky enough to live somewhere with grocery delivery but the stores were often out of things and needed to substitute and that didn’t work with my kids. COVID took our appetite and I had to offer them whatever food they were willing to eat that day, which was usually very something very specific.

Our symptoms lasted a week but by day 7 we were feeling good. They were saying that around day 7 is where you either got better or crashed, requiring hospitalization. We remained fever free for 24 hours and I took us out of isolation (the guidelines back then were basically just 24 hours fever free). The best day, though, the fever came back. The other symptoms too. This happened over and over. Sick a week then feeling 100% better for a couple days and then sick again. A month in is when it got worse. We were feeling worse and worse each day. It felt like the virus was eating us from the inside out. All the kids did was sit around on their iPads. All I did was sit around on my phone. We didn’t go outside. Didn’t play. It was harder and harder to force ourselves to eat and drink. I began having episodes where I almost passed out. I told my 15 year old how to do the sternal rub if I passed out and didn’t wake back up right away. I was delirious a lot of the time but didn’t know it. If you’re in total isolation, who is there to tell you you’re not making sense?

It wasn’t possible to get a test in March of 2020. Beyond the fact I couldn’t leave my four year old with severe COVID diarrhea home with his 15 year old brother (no childcare in isolation), they wouldn’t give me on unless I had fever, cough and shortness of breath or a known contact with someone wit COVID. When we were getting worse in April, I went to an urgent care where I used to work and basically used doctor-to-doctor privilege to get one even thought I didn’t qualify. By then it was too late for the test to have been accurate (maybe if I wasn’t delirious I would have realized this? Maybe we didn’t even know that at that point. Who the hell knows). I tested negative but the doc told me he thought it was a false negative given my symptoms.

GOD HELP YOU IF YOU TELL PEOPLE YOU HAVE COVID AND HAVEN’T HAD A POSITIVE TEST. The art of medicine means little these days. People want a test. Few will truly believe you had COVID without it.

The exhaustion was severe and I had to keep working full time. Some days I would do my phone appointments lying down because I was too tired to hold my arms up. By the end of a workday I was so tired, I didn’t have the cognitive energy to watch a movie. I couldn’t follow the plot line. Sometimes I’d just lie on the couch and stare all evening. The fever and chills came and went and brought an awful malaise with them. My joints hurt (left shoulder in particular), no appetite, nausea, diarrhea, stomach cramps, brain fog, a headache that nothing relieved, trouble balancing, flushing, neuropathic pain, extreme muscle tension, back pain, anxiety, depression, mania, apathy, conjunctivitis, insomnia, sore throats, runny nose, hives, and I developed hypertension. No, really. All of that.

My daughter couldn’t really do any distance learning and I really couldn’t handle everything I was handling and also do all the things I was expected to for my special needs son distance learning. I remember calling my daughter’s teacher crying and telling her to fail if she needed to, because I was doing everything I could just to not have a mental breakdown.

I’d lost my receptionist and I couldn’t exactly hire and train another one from isolation, so I was seeing patients remotely and also answering phones and emails, scheduling patients, sending out registration papers etc.

I was also dealing with my soon-to-be-ex-husband having a mental breakdown of his own and financially supporting him. At one point I had to worry about proving we truly did have a fever and needed to be in isolation to a judge since it was interfering with our ongoing custody battle.

And at one point sewage backed up in our basement. It was all very Job-like.

I’m not one to take these things lying down, though.

No one knew long COVID was a thing, so as our fever dragged on, it was scary. I was talking to all the docs I knew and none of them were seeing a fever like that. I began taking our vitals several times a day and recording it. I logged our symptoms and what we’d done that day, eaten. Anything I could think of to figure it out because we didn’t have time to wait around for someone else to do it. I figured out early on the fever was the key to it. Every other symptom you see in other conditions. But a fever lasting this long? It was unique. The fact it came and went was unique. Th e fact it didn’t respond to Tylenol or NSAIDs was bizarre. The fact it didn’t follow a typical fever pattern (worst at night and better in the morning) didn’t make sense. And there was something else: our fevers were synchronized. I could take 10am vitals and we were all fine. Fifteen minutes later I would start feeling chilled and look at my little guy who was now flushed. I’d check our temps and all five of us now had a fever. When it passed, it passed in all of us. That is not normal.

And then one day, ten weeks in, before I’d been able to figure it out, our symptoms went away. The kids went into a PANDAS flare and I gave them all IVIG. They had severe side effects which leads me to think their immune systems had been thrown really off balance. We went to the ocean for a week. And we seemed to be back to ourselves.

Except we weren’t. Looking back on it now, now that we’re truly doing better, we still had symptoms. My one son was depressed and I assumed it was because life is pretty crappy in lockdown, but once his long COVID was treated, his mood improved right away. I had an incredibly label mood all summer. I remember commenting on it to my friend, saying I was exhausted from actively having to reign myself in from being too high or too low everyday. My youngest had developed idiopathic hives. My oldest and my youngest were having difficulty learning. Their teachers were concerned. Our appetites were still off. I still couldn’t sleep.

On October 5th (also a Sunday. What’s it with Sundays?) our symptoms came back in full force. It was bad enough I took my oldest son and I to get tested to see if we’d been reinfected. We weren’t. But the symptoms wouldn’t go away. This time, I was aware of my cognitive impairment and the exhaustion was harder to deal with. I wasn’t going to let COVID ruin my kids’ lives and I sure as well wasn’t going to let it keep me from working. That was not an option. I’m the breadwinner for four kids. If I don’t work, we’re homeless. So, I decided I was going to figure this out once and for all.

I returned to the fever pattern. By now I’d joined long COVID patient groups online and even a COVID survivor physician group. I found other patients with the same synchronization of symptoms. It appeared in a piece in the New York Times. And two of my patients who I suspected had had COVID in February and now had long COVID also had this synchronization of symptoms. This pattern eventually led me to figuring out that our symptoms were actually mast cell based and I was able to develop a long haul COVID treatment for us that has reduced our symptoms by 90-95%. We still get flares but they’re manageable.

I hope someday we’ll be symptom free but I don’t know if that’s realistic or not. If there’s one thing coronavirus has taught us it’s that we don’t know shit. This little virus shut down the world. It’s killed millions. It’s likely left millions with long COVID too. And we still don’t know how to treat it. Not really.

I was sad today, looking back on it. Those ten weeks were so awful. Its return in October. Not knowing if we’d ever get better. People don’t get how scary it was. Remember March 2020? Remember how scared we all were? We knew nothing about this virus except that it was horrible enough to shut down the entire world. A plague. Like a sci fi movie. My kids don’t have normal immune systems so something as simple as strep or flu can knock them down for years. I couldn’t find any other kids with PANDAS with COVID. It’s a small community. I was talking to every practitioner and parent I could and we were the only ones. We were the guinea pigs. After everything we’d been through and overcome with PANDAS and now this? I was terrified. It was traumatic.

And so, I cried today. But suffering and sickness are inherent to life, so I knew there was no point wallowing. There was a party to set up, after all. We had The 1st Annual Spaar-Chiang-Fleming Corona Roast tonight. We made a corona cake and had balloons and glow in the dark axes and a bubble machine (why not?). And we had a coronavirus shaped piñata that we beat the hell out of (at one point my son was worried I was going to break the baseball bat. Damn, it felt good beating the living hell out of that paper virus). We each wrote down something awful about this past year and then something we wished for this upcoming year. We burnt them to send their ashes up to the fairies and saints. And we burned the piñata. The coronavirus is just a pile of ashes now. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I told my kids I’m proud of how well they’ve handled this awful year of sickness and lockdown. I am. And I told them there really will be better times ahead. One of my kids wish was very simple: to return to school. I don’t know if that will happen this year, but it will happen. As my daughter told me when I was upset the pizza we’d ordered for the party was 2 hours late: it’s okay. It’s not like the cake fell and smashed into the floor. The party of our new life was interrupted last March, but it’s only dreams deferred. The cake is still safe on the counter waiting for us. And it will taste that much more delicious when it’s finally time to eat it.

Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance
Between the parted pages and were pressed
In love’s hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants

MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh no!

I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers by the trees

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh no!

There will be another song for me
For I will sing it
There will be another dream for me
Someone will bring it
I will drink the wine while it is warm
And never let you catch me looking at the sun
And after all the loves of my life
After all the loves of my life
You’ll still be the one

I will take my life into my hands and I will use it
I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it
I will have the things that I desire
And my passion flow like rivers through the sky
And after all the loves of my life
Oh, after all the loves of my life
I’ll be thinking of you
And wondering why

MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh no!

Oh no
No
Oh no!

The United States Senate chose to acquit Donald Trump today. Everyone in that room knew that Trump was guilty. On top of that, they were the target of his crime. He tried to kill them. His followers still want to kill them. Many of them were afraid for their lives and their families if they voted to convict. We’ve heard nothing from Pence in all of this even though the traitors constructed a gallows from which to hang him. He’s hiding out, they say, because he’s afraid of more MAGA terrorists hurting him and his family.

Hmm, now where I have heard this before? Maybe I’m thinking of everyone from the janitor on up to head foot ball coach and local God, Joe Paterno, at Penn State that did nothing about serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky because they were afraid they’d lose their jobs. Or maybe the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of people who knew exactly what Jeffrey Epstein was doing and did nothing because they were afraid.

Feeling you might be killed is trauma. Being put in a situation where you can either choose to do the right thing and possibly die or do the wrong thing and live is the hardest thing you will ever have to decide. But it’s not difficult. There’s nothing complicated about stopping a child rapist or convicting an ex-President who committed treason and is clearly planning to try it again. There are no murky shades of gray.

To be placed in this position is a tremendous gift. That moment defines you. Everything before and everything after in your life accumulates to far less than the weight this moment carries in deciding if you are a good person or not. Other people have to go their whole lives plugging away at doing the right things day in and out, and always wondering in the back of their minds if they’re a good person. Those of us placed in the hard position outlined above get a beautifully dramatic and swift moment that cements our place in the moral universe.

I had such a moment and faced the very real fear of my beautiful babies, two and four at the time, and I being killed. I chose the right thing. We weren’t killed, but it almost destroyed me. I went through hell for years afterwards but I never doubted I was a good person and that I’d made the right choice. Even if it hadn’t worked out and he had killed me, I would have known I made the right choice. As the Spanish revolutionary Dolores Ibarruri said, it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

But but but they’re afraid for their families too! Ahhh. Sounds noble to want to protect your family, after all. Even people who are giving and understanding and kind, committed to religion and democracy and equality and all the other good things, falter when you bring their family into it. They justify their choosing what they know is wrong by saying they were protecting their family. Who could argue with that? Me I guess. Clearly I didn’t choose this path. We come to the story of Abraham then.

God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham obeys but God spares Isaac at the last moment. And God is well pleased with Abraham. I have atheist friends who point to this story as proof the Judeo-Christian God is, well, bad. What kind of loving God would do such a thing? And why should we consider Abraham a good person if he was willing to kill his own son? In truth, there are people who think I’m a bad mother and a bad person to have put my own children’s lives at risk to stop a man from hurting other children. And, in truth, I know this to be true because some people in my life said this to me. It sounds like something you write a three page paper about in your first year philosophy class. The safety of your family versus the greater good for humanity. Or like that train. The one that will hit ten people if you do nothing and will only hit one person if you flip the switch. Do you flip the switch and actively kill someone, or do nothing and passively allow ten people to die? What is the moral thing to do (or not do)?

The moment I called to turn him in, I prayed. I sat in my green mini van on a hot June day. The air conditioner was broken and my vents were blowing warm air in my face as I sat there sweating in a long, black heavy skirt from Land’s End. I sat and I prayed and said, “God please don’t let my babies die and please don’t let me die because they need me. If we die, then I guess that was your will because I know I’m doing the right thing.” In other words, I pulled an Abraham.

Plenty of Atheists make this choice as well, for the record. It isn’t about trusting God specifically. It’s about loving your fellow human beings and everything else in the universe, in the collective oneness. It’s about putting that love above fear. It’s as simple as that. There is no fear in love. It’s not easy, but it’s simple.

What people who take the easy way out don’t understand is that it isn’t the easy choice at all. It’s easy for one moment and hard for the rest of your life. You spend the rest of your life trying to make it sound difficult but it was really very simple. If it was difficult, then there was more than one right choice. If it was difficult, you did the best anyone would have in the same situation. If it was difficult, you really had no other choice, realistically speaking. After all, you’re only human. It’s not fair for anyone to judge you.

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and neuropsychiatrist-philosopher, wrote that “life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” Forty-three senators chose to sell their souls today. It was a simple choice that cannot be bent and turned to look difficult. I would assume a lot of them are sociopaths without a conscience, but even sociopaths are human and have a knowing deep within them that they have done wrong. They’ve chosen the easy way and it will be with them always.