On August 29, my mother will celebrate twice the lifespan that was once predicted for her by doctors at the UCLA Medical Center in 1955. She will be 80 years old.
She was born in 1929 with a co-arctation of the aorta (simply put, a broken heart), a condition first diagnosed by student health services at Los Angeles City College.
“It means that the aorta - the main vessel coming away from the heart - was constricted to the size of a pencil point, so the blood wasn’t getting through properly,” she describes today. “It was causing me problems - like nose bleeds and shortness of breath.”
In those years, she worked as secretary for Dean Paul Dodd at UCLA’s College of Letters and Science. He eventually referred her to Dr. William Longmire, then head of surgery at the newly-opened UCLA Medical Center.
The doctors that her own mother had taken her to for the nose bleeds as a child in the 1930’s had all said she would grow out of it.
“It could have been more serious in that age, but I was lucky. And because I wasn’t treated like an invalid, as many kids later on would have been, I played like a normal kid and climbed trees.”
So when Longmire saw the auxiliary blood system that had developed around her heart to compensate for the lack of blood flow, he was amazed.
“It’s a good thing I have half a brain myself, because I understood all these things,” Mom recalls with mirth.
Longmire recommended that she undergo a new procedure. With her condition, he said, she would likely never have children and doctors couldn’t guarantee her lifespan beyond 40 years.
“Can you imagine hearing that?” she says today. “I remember walking out of there in a total daze. I walked through the UCLA quad thinking my god, my god, what am I going to do?”
Bessie, her own mother and the grandmother I would never know, had died the year before of cancer. She was just 46 and my mother was only 24.
In 1955, however, my mother opted to have the surgery at UCLA. Fifty years later, she returned as a speaker at the medical center’s half-century anniversary celebration.
“I was one of their very first heart patients,” she says. “I would have had it sooner, but because of my mother’s health, I postponed having that surgery. Of course, I couldn’t get to those UCLA people until they opened in ‘55.”
Some people criticized her for being a guinea pig for the UCLA doctors.
“It was, after all, a teaching hospital at time and it still is. But I never thought of myself as a guinea pig.”
Five years after the surgery, my mother gave birth to me on Valentine’s Day - the day of hearts, as it turns out - and two years later, she gave birth again, this time to identical twins, my sisters Carolyn and Cynthia.
She who was once told she would never have children will celebrate her eighth decade of life on August 29 with her three daughters in the City of Angels where she has lived all her life.
Today I cannot imagine life without my mother, especially since I lost my other parent in my teens. I also cannot imagine what it must have been like for her to have lost her mother so young - and face soon thereafter a heart surgery.
But my mother is, as she says, a tough old cookie - and for me an enduring example whom I not only love, but respect and admire.
It wasn’t always that way, though.
Mom is very hard on herself for what she perceives as her shortcomings as a parent - and I admit that when I was a teenager, those were what I mostly saw. I blamed her for things I now see were well out of her control and certainly not her responsibility.
Through the years, I’ve come to see not the qualities I once wished she possessed, but the amazing qualities that she does - foremost among them, a deep and abiding capacity for love.
Today, she is my best friend.
“I doubt there are many people who could say they had an absolute saint for a mother,” she said for this column. “Unless it were I, because my poor, darling mother didn’t live long enough and she pretty much was a saint.”
But I don’t need a saint for a mother. I’m deeply grateful for the one I have. Happy birthday, Mom.
