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Remembering Becca

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February is a significant month for me, for a lot of reasons. First of all, Valentine’s Day (or maybe I prefer February 15th, when all the chocolate goes on sale… let’s be real), and also my birthday are in this month. Secondly, February is congenital heart defect awareness month. CHD has an impact on my life. Not only do Ben’s career plans revolve around helping people with CHD (he wants to be a cardiologist), but my mother-in-law was born with a ventricular septal defect, which is a congenital heart defect. She had surgery a few years ago to correct it, and it was quite the process. Additionally, CHD Awareness Month means a lot to me this year because in 2018, I lost someone to CHD.

You know, I have sat down to write this post so many times. I wrote it in my head every night for a month while I cried silently into my pillow. I have wondered, why do I even need to put these thoughts out on the internet? What purpose is that going to serve? It felt selfish, somehow, to vomit all my grief and guilt and confusion into the digital world. Maybe that’s dumb, but like I said, I’m feeling a lot of confusion and guilt. Does losing someone always involve guilt? So far, it always has for me.

Today, though, it seems like the right day to do this, because today I know it will serve a better purpose. Currently, it’s congenital heart defect awareness week, and telling this story is my way to bring awareness to CHD. In doing so, I think I am doing something that would make Becca glad. And I only want to tell this story if I think that she would like it. Otherwise, it’s not fair.

On October 12, 2018, my friend Becca left broke free from her pain and left the world a little emptier. To me, it seems that her kind heart broke over an unkind world. Medically, it had beat as many times as her tetralogy of fallot would allow. She wasn’t supposed to survive infancy, much less childhood, yet she had lived a few days past her 26th birthday.

I can’t stop thinking how unfair it is to have to say goodbye at 26.

You know, Becca seemed really typical. She was pretty, funny, and ambitious. She didn’t seem like someone who needed to be on oxygen or park in a handicap spot, so people didn’t really understand the big deal about her CDH. I don’t think I really was aware of it for the first couple years I knew her.

I met Becca 15 years ago, when I was eight or nine and she was 10 or eleven. We were in a sign language choir together. I remember one year, we were performing a song about heroes. I wore nurse costume, and told her it was because my grandma had been a nurse. She was wearing a doctor costume, and told me it was because doctors kept her alive despite her heart condition. I was ten at the time, and hospitals were foreign places to me. I don’t think I thought much of it until years later during one of her scarier surgeries. She was never “the kid with the heart condition” to me. She was always just Becca– “You know, Becca with the pretty blonde hair.”

As we entered our high school years, I remember Becca coming to practices lugging an oxygen tank behind her. She would walk in, look around in mock surprise, and declare, “Didn’t you get the memo? It’s B.Y.O.O. night! Bring Your Own Oxygen!” We’d laugh, and get to work.

I stopped going to the choir when I was 14. School was demanding. I didn’t have time for it anymore. But I did keep in touch with Becca by email, and I saw her face on the cover of a medical magazine once. I remember reading it and thinking, wow, this CHD is really big deal. She’s kind of famous in the medical community.

We lost touch for years. I don’t know how. I lost touch with a lot of people as I transitioned from high school to college when I was sixteen. I remember thinking about reaching out during my late teens and, in my immature insecurity, worrying that she wouldn’t want to stay friends with me– after all, I was younger, and she was more popular in our circles, prettier, funnier, more outgoing. It was dumb of me to worry about, since she had been so nice to me during all my awkward middle school years. If fact, she had made the tornado of teenage social crap a lot more manageable with her consistent kindness. But teenagers don’t always think their insecurities through.

Looking back as an adult, I feel a lot of guilt that I didn’t try. Of course people come in and out of our lives, so I don’t know why I feel so guilty. I think mostly, under the guilt, there is sadness. I lost several years I could have had with a friend that I had cared about. I’ve lost touch with a lot of people in my life. Some I have reconnected with, others I have not. I guess I always think that, thanks to Facebook, it will be easy to strike up friendships again once we stop moving all over the place.

As we were planning to move back to Arizona, I thought about the people I’d like to reconnect with. Becca was one of the first people I thought of, so I sent her a Facebook message and we became “official” friends again. I was hoping to see her when I moved back in July.

But by July, Becca was in California in the hospital. She told me in the fall that she wouldn’t get to come back home. That was really hard to hear. We messaged back and forth a bit for the next couple of weeks.

When I went to the hospital to have my baby, I thought about her a lot. I was not enjoying getting stabbed with needles and feeling so much pain and being walked in on all the time. But for me, the hospital stay was short and ended with a baby, joy, and a new lifetime to look forward to. Becca was also experiencing pain, intrusion, and plenty of needles. But her hospital stay was so different, and the end result was the opposite of mine. It made me so sad. It was not fair at all that I got to experience this and have so much to look forward to. Why couldn’t she have the same?

The last conversation I had with her, I sent her a photo of the baby. I wanted to talk with her about something that didn’t have to do with medical stuff, since she probably had to talk a lot about that sort of thing. Then, a few days later, I read her mom’s post on Facebook and all I could do was cry and cry.

I had a really hard time processing everything. Part of me felt like I didn’t have a right to grieve, since I hadn’t seen her in person in almost a decade. I went to her beautiful memorial service but not the reception (even though I would have been welcomed), because I didn’t feel like I had a right to go when I hadn’t been there enough during her life.

I’ve been trying to process this all for the last four months. First, somehow I don’t really understand death. It doesn’t seem real that someone can be here and smile and make memories, and then suddenly they are just gone. I believe in God. I believe in Heaven. I believe people live on after physical death. At the same time, death doesn’t register with me at all.

Secondly, there’s something so wrong about a 26-year-old having to say goodbye to everything and everyone. It’s not fair. CHD is FREAKING NOT FAIR. Have I told God this? Have I questioned Him a lot in the past few months? Yes, I have.

Finally, I have been thinking a lot about the person I am and the kind of person I want to be. I have been dealing with guilt. I have talked to Ben a lot about how I wish I had understood CHD more and how I wished I knew better how to be a good friend to Becca. The idea of visiting her at the hospital when we were younger did cross my mind. But I thought that might be a nuisance, and I didn’t want to be a nuisance. I didn’t realize until I read her blog years later that a hospital visit would have been most welcome. As an adult, and as someone with more understanding of disabilities, I realized a lot of things I could have done differently to be a good friend. When we were both at the state fair, it would have been awesome if I had hung out with her rather than gone running off to enjoy the thrill rides. I didn’t even know that rides were off-limits for her, and I never thought to ask. I could have sent her an email after a procedure to ask how she was doing, but I thought maybe bringing it up was rude, like when someone inappropriately comments on a missing limb. Stupid to think? Maybe, but I didn’t really get it.

So why am I sharing this? Maybe a little bit of it is personal processing. Maybe a little bit of it is regret. But mostly, this is a story of how I was not aware of CHD. I think it’s easy for those of us without much experience with disabilities or sickness to brush off “awareness months.” What does awareness do, right? Shouldn’t we be donating to research or something? Sure. But awareness is important, too. Being aware of CHD, and educating ourselves about them, will help us to relate to people better. It makes us better friends. Becca had a lot of awesome friends who “got it” better than I did. She had a lot of friends — both in the CHD community and out of it– who were educated on CHD. Or maybe they weren’t, and they were just good friends in general. I don’t know. But I do know I personally missed out because I wasn’t as aware of CHD as I might have been.

So the moral of the story is this: be aware of CHD! Don’t be afraid to admit your lack of knowledge so you can learn what life is like in that world. Recognize that heart conditions are often invisible illnesses. Have a friend with CHD? You might need to ask questions– like, can you eat at this restaurant, or should we pick a different one? Can you do this hike? What would YOU like to do? How are you feeling today? Or, you may have to be extra understanding when someone with a CHD has to suddenly cancel or is feeling super low-energy. And don’t be afraid to be there. I am always afraid of being annoying. Don’t worry about being annoying. Be there. Be aware. Be a friend.

Want to learn more about living with CHD? Start here, with Becca’s blog.

Fort Willem

American University of the Caribbean, AUC, Blog, Caribbean, Expats, Expats and TCKs, International Travel, Nature, Saint Martin/ Sint Maarten, Spouses Organization, Uncategorized

Breathlessly, we broke through the trees and cactus patches. Below us, the island spread like a lazy sea otter, floating peacefully on the blue ocean. Above us, we could see the antiquated stones peeking out from among the brambles. We had found it: the lost fortress.

Sound like the beginning to an adventure novel? Well, sometimes living on Sint Maarten felt like being a character in an adventure novel. I didn’t stick to the beaten path much when I lived there, so I often found myself on some old goat trail leading to a lonely summit (fun!), the dump (not fun), or a tangle of poison apple trees (even less fun). Today’s hike, though, led me and my husband, Ben, to the ruins of the island’s original fort.

Fort Willem was the first of three forts built on the island. It was constructed by the British in 1801 to protect the new territory from invading colonists and pirates. Apparently, it wasn’t particularly effective, because not long after, the fort was captured by the Dutch. The Dutch named it Fort Willem, after their king, but didn’t use it for more than a few decades. The fort offered awesome views of the bay, but unfortunately was too high and too far inland to effectively cannonball the enemy. Fort Amsterdam, built near Fort Willem but much closer to the water, was constructed to replace it.

View of Great Bay from Fort Willem

Fort Willem is on every map of the island, and it’s advertised as a fun outing by several websites and tour companies who have apparently never been to Sint Maarten. Just because a location is labeled on a map and it looks close to the tourism district does not mean it’s a great little experience for every tourist. Especially when you’re on an island made of really tall HILLS. Fort Willem is ridiculously hard to find. And you’re guaranteed to end up bleeding in at least one place by the time you reach the fortress.

Giant shoe-penetrating thorns

That being said, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go anyway! If you like hiking and don’t mind a little adventure, you’ll have a blast hunting for the fort.

How Not to Get There:

I spent weeks asking around about the location of Fort Willem. The map I had wasn’t quite clear about which labeled hill corresponded to the undulating mounds of earth near Philipsburg. But nobody, local or expat, had been there or could tell me where it was. A lot of people didn’t even know what what I was talking about. But I was determined to visit every accessible location labeled on my SXM map (which I eventually did!), so I didn’t give up.

Fort Willem is located on- surprise!- Willem Hill, next to Cay Hill. There are two ways to get to the top. The first way includes near-death experiences and trespassing on a TV tower. This was the way we got up. We parked across from Sonesta Great Bay Resort and followed a winding road- deceptively named Fort Willem Road- up the hill. It was incredibly steep. When we got to the end of the paved road, we followed what started out as a well-worn dirt path. As the path went on, it became narrower and less beaten down. I guess there had been a lot of relic-hunters like us who gave up and went back at this point. They were smarter than us.

The path started to lead us along treacherously steep drop-offs and through tiny gaps in the thorn trees. I don’t even know how we squeezed through while fending off the wasps, but we did.

“I think this is a goat path,” I told Ben, who agreed with me and wondered aloud if we should go back. We decided we might not survive that trip a second time, and continued on. The best part thus far was the STUNNING views of Philipsburg and Pond Island.

If you find yourself here, you’re in the wrong place

Once we’d scrambled up some slippery dirt inclines, followed an ancient boundary wall built by people enslaved by the Dutch, circumnavigated a cactus forest, and bushwhacked through the thick undergrowth, we finally came to what looked like a really old building wall. Finally! We climbed up, and to our dismay, found ourselves on the foundation of a TV tower. Yikes!

At this point, I started worrying that we’d trespassed AGAIN and might get in trouble this time. Vowing to only follow human trails from then on, we got out of the TV tower area as fast as possible.

What did we find on the other side of the tower? Why, a road, of course. A nice, beautiful paved road leading up the side of the hill from the street below.

Armed with this new discovery, and now feeling much better about the trip down, we began to search for the fort.

WE FOUND IT!

To be honest, there’s not much left of Fort Willem. I heard a rumor that some of the stones were used to build Fort Amsterdam once Willem was abandoned. We could now see Amsterdam below us…. hundreds of feet down, it stood like a LEGO structure on the end of its peninsula. Maybe they just rolled the stones down the hill?

Fort Amsterdam

After a few minutes of searching, we finally found the ruins of the wall and battlements of Fort Willem. Overgrown by bushes and invisible from the road below, the wall offers a breathtaking view of the island and the sea. Wow! It did require a climb, but the end result was worth it. We sat on the wall and tried to imagine what it must have been like to man the guns from all the way up here, long before the buildings and cruise ships appeared below.

How to Get to Fort Willem

Now that I’ve described the first way to get up, I should probably tip you off on the second, and far better, way up the hill. The road we found was a much better route. We followed it down and back to our car without incident.

Walking back to our car…. down and around the hill

If you’re going toward Philipsburg from the Simpson Bay area, you’ll go right past the road leading up to Fort Willem. When you get to the part of the road between the hospital and Little Bay, look for Otter Road. Otter joins up with Camel Road, which is the road you need to take.

You’ll find the turnoff on this road

You can drive most of the way up, or park in the neighborhood below and hike up.

Old Battlements

This is definitely one of the most painful and more random excursions available on Sint Maarten. If you’re looking for a cool hike and you only have a few days on the island, go to Pic Paradis or Belvue. If you want to see a fort, go to Fort Amsterdam or Fort Louis. But if you want to go off the beaten path and do some Indiana Jones type exploring, Fort Willem is always waiting for you!

The Bluffs

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So far my life in California has consisted of rocking my sweet baby and keeping my crazy dog as sane as possible. It’s a big change from last January, when I was working multiple jobs, braving a Detroit winter, writing a dissertation, and wondering why I felt so nauseous all the time! I’m so unstressed right now that it almost makes me wonder if I’m forgetting to do something complicated and important. But nope, ten weeks of pseudo-vacation means low stress and pretty much zero pressing plans.

Tummy time!

Because our time in California is too short to settle in but too long to be just a trip, we decided to stay in an Airbnb. That means we’re a family of three plus a dog living in a bedroom in someone’s house, but it also means I don’t have to clean the bathroom or remember to pay utilities. Plus, the people we’re staying with are pretty great.

Happy to be home after a day in neuro

Another perk of living here is the hiking! We love our Phoenix hiking, so we were glad to find that Kern County has a lot of cool hiking trails. In our town, there’s a park with walking trails that run down the side of the bluffs to a river walk. It’s an awesome place to explore!

During this rotation, Ben gets to come home early in the afternoon, even though he’s technically on the clock til five. He has to stay in his button-up and tie, and he has to wear a pager, but so far, he hasn’t been called back to the hospital. Best rotation ever!

Today, when he got off, we decided to go hike the bluffs. We were quite the group! Ben was in his work clothes, and I was in sweat pants with a hoodie-clad Little Man strapped to myself. And you can’t forget the Kito, who was euphoric because of the new trails and myriad of small wild animals. We let her off leash for a while, and she went nuts. She earned herself a bath after careening through standing water and crashing through the bushes after squirrels.

Tomorrow is Saturday, so we get to explore more! We’ve joined a hiking club and have our first excursion with the group in the morning. Life is good.

Need a Devotional?

Bible, Blog, Uncategorized

Time to get back into your devotional routine? If you’re looking for a great personal or family devotion book, check out From a Pastor’s Heart and Hand by Joseph Oswald. 

This book is reminiscent of the compiled sermons of classic theologians. They are presented in a direct, oratory style, and you can almost hear the author’s voice addressing the reader passionately and personally. The text is engaging and punctuated with short illustrations from the lives of influential people, catchy sayings, and humorous anecdotes. Scripture and prose flow together seamlessly.  

This devotional is perfect for families, but it’s applicable to any believer. The writing is clear and succinct, conveying practical messages that are alternatively encouraging and convicting. The devotionals are short enough and straightforward enough for children to grasp, but they cut to the heart of issues experienced by adults as well. Topics range from faithfulness to finances and everything in between.

If you only have time for a devotional reading, you can absorb a chapter of the book with your morning coffee. Or, you can sit down with your family at dinner time and expand the devotional with the questions and Bible reading at the end of chapters. 

As someone whose life has been deeply influenced by the author of this book, I can testify that From a Pastor’s Heart and Hand is the perfect title for this devotional. Pastor Joe Oswald has spend his years shepherding congregations, children, P.E. classes, and youth with both loving guidance and hands-on engagement. 

From a Pastor’s Heart and Hand flows from this discipleship, which is at the heart of Christian teaching and leadership. For this reason, this book is sure to impact your life in a small way each day and for the rest of your life. Years after reading it, you may find yourself engaging in “Thankful Thursday” prayer or reminding yourself that “when you point a finger at others, four are still pointing at yourself.”

You can get this book on Amazon in either print or Kindle format. If you don’t have a devotional for the New Year, why not make a strong start with From a Pastor’s Heart and Hand?

Upscale Living

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Most of the time, applying for residency is very, very expensive for med students. It’s not uncommon for them to drop ten grand on interview season!

However, there are those unicorn interviews where you get treated instead of paying out the nose. 

We got lucky enough to get one of those. 

A hospital in Palm Springs, California invited Ben to interview for residency, and since it is pretty close to home, he decided to go and take me with him. Actually, we decided to make a family road trip out of it! As I was planning our Airbnb bookings, Ben told me that the hospital was paying for interviewees’ hotel stays. In the Marriott Resort. 

Oh, yeah. 

Even better, they told Ben to bring me to the pre-interview dinner, which was at the very fancy resort restaurant. 

I have never been to an open-bar event before, so I felt a bit out of my element! Especially since the other significant others seemed to fit into this setting quite easily. Let’s just say I don’t do well in conversations about decorators and deaigner purses.

But the homemade ginger ale was pretty bomb, and some of the other inteviewees were also from Caribbean schools, so cocktail hour ended up being a lot of fun! Dinner was great, too-  one of the resident’s wives was from Mexico, and she and another resident patiently let me bushwhack my way through conversations in Spanish. 

The most fun part of the day, though, was taking baby to the pool and showing Ben the baby swim techniques we learned in swim lessons. So much fun!

After a night in the massive suite, Ben went to his interview and baby and I took full advantage of the resort. 

As you can see, the resort (and its 1.5 mile walking path) was a wonderful place to spend a morning!

Baby even got some tummy time on the lawn.

Residency interviews have their perks. 

Baby Johnson

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We welcomed little baby Johnson into our family last month! And I have to say it has been the best few weeks of my life. He’ll be a month old in a couple of days, and I just want those days to crawl by… I love the newborn stage. I keep telling myself that I will love the next stage, too… We have smiles and rolling over and improved vision to look forward to.

In other news, Ben is enjoying his cardiology rotation and has been going to residency interviews. Life is changing so quickly and more change is on the horizon!