I am not here to grieve but celebrate and honor the life of one of the strongest women I have ever known. This will be long but a lot of details have been omitted. I first met Pat in early October of 1978 in San Francisco.
My patrol partner was dating one of her house mates and I was invited to come over and hang out. Pat came in, we were introduced, then she sat on the couch with a paperback and didn’t say half a dozen words to me that whole night. But we started dating and I fell in love with her.
I was transferring to Germany so I asked her to marry me and she said yes. I flew her out to Iowa and we were married on the 17 th of December. In January I left for Germany and was able to get her over in March so we had a three year honeymoon in Europe.
Saw a lot of concerts, carnivals, festivals, and historical sites and we had our favorite Gasthous We came back to San Francisco in 1982 and settled into her child hood home. She got a job as a medical secretary to an orthopedic surgeon and she got real good at it. She could fill in the blanks and omissions from the doctor’s transcription, correct errors and talk to them in their language.
Later, in 1988 we moved to Vallejo. Her heart attack in 2001 was just the beginning. Luckily she was sitting in an exam room at the ER when it happened.
Doctors were worried about brain function because she had been dead for so long and when she did come back, short term memory was shot and she just wasn’t quite the same person she was. The hospital had never seen a heart attack quite like hers so they sent her to a specialist who recreated the cardiac episode to figure it out. Turns out she had an extra chamber in her heart and the valves had weakened to the point that they couldn’t keep up.
Her kidneys were also failing. The doctors closed the chamber up and told her to take two weeks before going into the office. She took one week off and was back to work.
In 2009 she had ovarian cysts removed and developed a post op infection. A nasty little drug resistant bug called MRSA. She was put into an ICU induced coma with a machine breathing for her, tubes feeding her and draining her, and two heavy duty antibiotics plugged in.
She went into surgery every other day for nine days. When the doctors finally closed her up, she had to learn to breath again, building up the strength to breath on her own, to sit up in bed and walk again. I learned to do the wound care so I could get her home.
It took ten months to fully recover. In 2010 she was crossing a street and an F150 turned right and ran over her foot. Shattered her ankle and cut off blood supply to her foot causing an amputation of her second toe.
She had a metal plate and two dozen screws holding her ankle together. Cellulites set in and they had to take all that hardware back out. She spent three weeks in the hospital and four more at a rehab hospital.
Eventually she got tired of hospitals and demanded that she come home. By then, I had plenty of experience in wound care so I checked her out and brought her home. It took a full year to recover from that and she never did walk right after.
In 2015 the medical episodes started to be more frequent. COPD crept in and her vocal cords, damaged with so many intubations, became weaker. Every breath she took sounded like it was going to be her last.
Her heart valves were getting weeker, pumping only at 25% of capacity and her kidneys were in bad shape. She had another cardiac episode that was mild, she was falling more often and then started to loose more of her memory. She started to loose track of days, appointments, and we made many a trip into ER.
Her red blood cell count started to tank and she needed weekly blood tests to monitor. Most often she also needed an injection to bring it back up, but now and then a blood transfusion or an Iron insfusion was called for. In January of 2024 she started to fade out and while at the ER, went nonresponsive.
She was intubated and sent to the CCU at MercyOne North Iowa. She was drugged up and on a respirator while the docs tried to figure out what was going on. They drew fluids of every type (even spinal fluid) and three kinds of brain scans before finally deciding that she may have had some kind of seizure.
Two weeks in CCU and another week in Physical Therapy before she was strong enough that I could get her back home. This past June we were on a road trip to California, attending the Native American 500 Mile Spiritual Marathon. She attended last year and had a great time so she was excited about this trip.
But in the early hours of 17 June, the first day of the run, she had a repeat seizure and her body couldn’t recover. Her body shut down and she was in my arms as her spirit crossed over. I kissed her goodby one last time as EMT was arriving.
Throughout all the surgeries, broken bones, illnesses, wound care, injections, procedures, lab draws, infusions and transfusions she never complained. She always tried to put on a smile, Her arms were guaranteed at least one needle stick a week and most of the time two or three. She had wounds that would have me moaning, crying and whining but she took it all on and wouldn’t let it defeat her.
But I could see the toll these issues were taking on her and the hardest part was watching her body slowly shut down. Patricia was a supporter of Women’s Rights, Animal Rights, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Ecology rights and Democrats. She was also a “childless cat lady.
” She offered her talents in data entry for the local Hilliary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren canvassers and served as an alternate delegate at the Iowa Democratic convention for Warren. She was also an avid reader specializing in romance novels of all flavors and a fan of General Hospital. She was very vocal on facebook; she lurked on KOS though I don’t know if she ever had an account and also stalked all her favorite republicans on twitter.
Forty-five and a half years we were side by side; even when we were separated, we were still side by side. So many memmories we made together. I love you, Pattypoo and I dearly miss you.
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