Some of Carol's Back Pages
Above all, she loved her little Morkie, Tribble, who was the daughter she never had. The daughter her ex-husband killed, she said, with his physical abuse during her one and only pregnancy. And later her battle with cancer ending in a maternity ward where she woke up to the news that a total hysterectomy had been performed.
But Carol was a fighter and a dreamer. Devastated by her failed marriage and inability to bear children, she decided to finally get the education that had always been denied her, and to build a meaningful life for herself.
When I met her in 1987, her divorce was not yet final, and her claim for Social Security disability was still pending. Those two obstacles were soon overcome, and her college studies advanced despite constant exhaustion and frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia.
These were the best years of my life, though at the time I complained about us not spending enough time together. She would say, "it’s for the best that I get my degree so we’ll have two incomes." And that was that.
We played tennis. Went swimming. Went to the wave pool several times. Took an unscheduled trip to the Smoky Mountains, where we camped out and rode the rapids (and Carol suffered her first back injury). Wrote love poems to each other. Joined poetry groups. Participated in poetry readings. Went for long walks in the forest.
Then in 1990, Carol’s health took a dramatic turn for the worse. We were taking tennis lessons together at Jefferson Community College. Carol stopped and turned her head as if to better hear a distant sound. Her first seizure. The first of hundreds. An ambulance was called. She was taken to a hospital and released. Maybe it was a one-time thing they said. How I wish that were true.
The next seizure occurred on May 4th, 1990, at the twenty-year anniversary of the Kent State murders. Along with several other poets, she had read one of her poems earlier in the day, but upon visiting the actual site of the shootings, her emotions were evidently flooded causing a seizure.
Local neurologists nearly destroyed her with phenobarbital and Dilantin, but thankfully after having her brain waves monitored for a couple days (and nights) at Allegheny General in Pittsburgh, she was put on Depakote, which provided minimal seizure control.
Even with her seizure disorder, she finished her undergraduate degree and started work on her masters in counseling. Without checking records, I don't recall exactly when it happened, but Carol was sexually harassed as an intern at a local mental health facility. When she brought this to the attention of her internship advisor, he also sexually harassed her.
The school “circled the wagons” and dismissed her from the university. I believe she was just one course shy of earning her masters at that point.
We found a wonderful attorney to represent her against the school, Thomas Hampton of Barnesville OH. Carol spent the next two or three years working on nothing but her lawsuit. The one exception was a brief stint as social worker at the LaBelle Nursing Center in an attempt to raise some money for legal fees. She worked too many hours for too little pay, and ended up being in a car accident making a turn off her street one day on the way to work - a guy in a truck, who didn't even stop - classic hit and run. The back injury she sustained plagued her the rest of her life.
Next was the nightmare of the rotting teeth. A neurologist from Youngstown who wrote her scripts for Depakote for years, neglected to mention that Depakote causes “dry mouth”, which leads to tooth decay. At first Carol tried to save her teeth. By the time she was convinced it was a losing battle, no one would pull them! One idiotic osteopath kept sending her for test after test before he would approve her for removal of her teeth. Finally, a common sense gastroenterologist told the oral surgeon, “get these teeth out before this woman starves to death!”
By the time it was finally done, part of her jawbone had to be removed as well.
It was just in the last two or three years that we achieved near total control of seizures. They definitely took a toll on her, but we felt truly blessed to be free of them!
It always seemed like once we got one problem under control, another would pop up. In the last couple years that trouble was “reflux". Once we had that solved we wanted to travel and explore - make the best of our "golden years”. Just being together was enough, sharing simple pleasures. But after all she’d been through, I wanted so much to give her more.