Well that was a weird way to close a year!
When we last spoke in September, I was telling you tales of working with Jimmy Buffett, thinking I’d be right back with more fun stories after a quick run to New Orleans for meetings welcoming the 2024 Jazz Festival season.
I hurried south, came back north and slid into my next adventure as the main witness for the plaintiff in a trial set in Northampton. I’d known this adventure was coming up; it had been on the books for a few years, though its date had been set and reset throughout the COVID-19 era of courtroom-distancing. But we were here, and I was ready to witness justice march its way to victory.
As it turns out, the American court system is an adversarial system that essentially hopes the jury gets it and finds the truth through what people are throwing down. As a witness, I had to swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The defense lawyers never swore to that, and did their jobs with some work that raised my eyebrows. Where’s Perry Mason, when you need him?
The trial lasted six emotional weeks, taking me all the way to the middle of December. By day I was in the courtroom. By evening I was doing all the other work I had before me, and, in one late-afternoon virtual meeting with my Jazz Fest brethren, I recognized that all of them were Zooming in from their sick beds where they were wheezing through RSV.
As I was heading to North Carolina for good old family holiday celebrations, I dashed in for some vaccines just to keep everything moving.
I took off for North Carolina with a disappointing lack of snowy terror through the mountains of Pennsylvania — how is it Christmas with no ice slicking up Interstate 84? I kept going until I reached the mountains of western North Carolina where we were all meeting to ride the Polar Express. While I have no offspring of my own, other members of my family continue to sprinkle the Earth with Parati descendants and it was a thrill to see everyone, old and new in one magical place, together.
But you know what those tiny elves bring with them? Germs! The kind that shut down their daycare centers moments after I got there, and the absent snow was apparently replaced with sprinkles of floating pathogens. Not necessarily a persistent napper, I tried to restore some energy and room in my lungs with new downtime. A lifelong asthmatic, I (clinically) learned years ago that, what kills asthmatics is panic. Afraid of not getting enough air, we keep inhaling without taking the time to exhale, until there’s no room left in the lungs for refreshment. I’ve always known how to remain calm and manage my intake, so, when my inhaler wasn’t giving me the relief I needed on Christmas Day, I began monitoring the seconds between every single breath, squeezing out as much air as I could before turning to fill them again.
Nobody wants to wreck Christmas Day by going to the emergency room, but, in my revised notes for 2024, I have down that you want to go on the major holiday to avoid the explosion of the day after, when the entire town of Concord, North Carolina, ended up celebrating a record-breaking ruckus in the hospital ER. Patients lined the hallways on stretchers and in wheelchairs, trying to get in.
When I arrived that morning, I could barely walk nor talk, so done were my lungs, and I withered for hours in the waiting room accompanied by my sister on one side, and the memory of my Ashfield friend Mariel Kinsey who, when asked by a hospice visitor if she was afraid of dying, had said, “No, I’ve always wanted to go to Heaven. I’m so excited!” I could share that excitement, I thought, and held Mariel’s hand as I waited to see a doctor.
By 10 p.m. I was finally heading home with a diagnosis of pneumonia and lower respiratory infection, but with lungs newly bolstered by nebulized meds, and steroids to give me power again. Knowing I wasn’t necessarily medically required to join Mariel in Heaven gave me the strength to go back to my sister’s house and prepare to heal.
And here I am! Not completely well, but breathing much more confidently than I was before. I’m ready to salute the New Year with gratitude for the workers; those at the hospital who stood me up and got me home, as well as to the staff at the courthouse back in Northampton. They know the difficulties we go through in a trial and were warmly encouraging every day through check-in and daily rounds as they made sure everyone was where we were supposed to be in our routines. I appreciated them for that.
And now on to 2024. Revived and revitalized, ready to jolly up the Earth with music, festivities and lots of good, strong, rejuvenating breaths.
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.