When doctors discovered I had Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW), a heart condition, I was a two-week-old infant. I'm described as a "Negro" on my birth certificate. A "Negro" born of "Negro" parents in 1953. My father's occupation is listed as a "laborer." The details are missing, of course; for he picked cotton in Arkansas before arriving in Chicago where he became a beef boner. I have a black-and-white of my mother, seated before a professional photographer, no doubt, in a white nurse's aid uniform. This, as they say, was before my time.
When it came time for me to attend the Catholic school two blocks away, I carried to my teacher, an envelop with five dollars enclosed. My tuition in those days. I don't recall how the nuns knew I couldn't attend gym or play in schoolyard. I also don't recall failing first grade. I remember Many years later, I came across a box of old documents and my report cards. My first grade report card showed boxes filed with numbers. All double-digits! Numbers representing days away from school. Days hospitalized, unknown. I don't recall having a conversation with my grandparents or parents about my heart condition. As a child, I didn't care to know the details of something so annoying, if not at times painful.
What I did know and felt comfortable, if not downright pleased about was that my first eleven years were spent living with a stay-at-home grandmother and a grandfather who worked as janitor for our building and four others.
I didn't notice the orange cones on gray road while my mother did.
Years later, after I graduated from college, the first in the family, she asked me to take a walk with my aunt, her sister. Just do it. Mind you, my brief trip to New York City proved to me that money mattered. I hadn't saved enough to move there. But I did my research on Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. I had located a roughly 200-dollar cheap one-bedroom apartment and notified the manager that I would be arriving by June of that year, 1977. But my mother is asking that I follow my aunt. Somewhere.
After six or seven blocks of walking in silence with a woman who has never had much to say to me, and she lived only two blocks away, I could see where we were headed. Even while I understood the road ahead for me as a Black woman with a heart condition, I believed Disability Benefits would become one more yellow cone that I would be complicit in placing before me. A stigma. I would be frowned upon as someone receiving government aid. And has she ever worked?
For a good part of my employment years, "preexisting conditions" trumped my heart condition. Since my first summer of high school, I have worked. I worked all through college, and immediately after graduating from college, I worked at a prominent newspaper as a copyclerk, for sure, a position requiring a good deal of energy. I sprinted about a huge newsroom, grabbing news copy from reporters and rushing these pages to a receiving bin. Trips down to the printing presses offered me the opportunity to hone my skills at concealing shortness of breath. Something never asked on my future curriculum vitae.
By college, I sprinted my way from one building to another. By the second system and after a heart catheter procedure, I biked from class to class--thanks to Propranolol now. I added to my skill at concealing short of breath, the ability to pretend all was well with me, despite a heartbeat racing in my chest. I could talk to myself, in silence, of course, keeping that smile on my face. And on good days, my heart would respond by slowing now. Never reaching that WPW speed. However much I feared hospitalization or worse, what terrified me more was sharing the knowledge of my "preexisting" condition with a co-worker or supervisor who would love nothing more than to run to HR. I worried about insurance companies discovering that I described myself as healthy.
One prominent insurance company came close to discovery. Or rather, the company knew.
After working my day shift, I accepted the offer by the guys in photograph (this paper didn't hire women photographers at the time) to ride along with them on the night shift. On my return to the newsroom, my heart "went off." Two hundred or so beat per minute.
Ambulance, no. I called my mother! This is a real job, I told myself. Compared to high school and college years of working "under the table" for the priests and nuns, cleaning toilets or answering the phones for survey companies in Chicago, this is real.
In the end, my cardiologist saved me--that is--saved my job! That's what mattered to a 22-year old Black woman out the door by myself. The insurance company, on the other hand, frustrated at not being able to get straight answers, backed off but with a warning: don't knock on our door again!
I researched, saved my income, and reminded my mother that there were cardiologists in California too. A couple of months later, in Los Angeles where either streets rose up before me. I experienced many episodes of WPW, episodes never recorded in an ambulance or in an emergency room. Let alone the usual ICU room. Even full-time employment at an answering phone service wouldn't have offered health insurance to its workers. And as a junior writer for a community paper focused on social justice, you were on your own when it came to your health! And pharmacies never hand out free beta blocker medication! When not putting most all of my income in an envelop and sending it off to the landlord, I managed to eat, spending as little as possible at the grocery store.
Back in Chicago, I worked on my master's degree employed somewhere in the city. To complete the two-year degree, I needed five years because I attended classes in the late afternoon or evenings. One class per semester. Unless I was able to pay for two classes a term. For the first two years of my master's degree this is what happened since I worked as a 30-hour Student Activities Director at a 2-year college. For a time, teaching adult-continuing education courses, also at two-year colleges, freed me from calling answering machine or survey companies. Something I had to do almost every summer for a time because collection agents seemed to love to call me, threatening to take away any and everything I own? The student loan from my college years was in default. Lady! We're the government! In the meantime, so many of these minimum-wage jobs, including almost 10 years of teaching for the city colleges, barely with Social Security.
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