Lessons from Rehab

I’m lucky: aside from some minor elective procedures and one C-section delivery, I’ve entered hospitals as a visitor or volunteer, not as an inpatient.

A hip replacement — common, but invasive — recently changed that. I write this one month post-op, looking back on physical healing and life lessons learned. My appreciation for the good health I enjoy, the family I depend on, and the professionals who restore us to wellness is reinforced.

Since my early career as hospital manager at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham (now Brigham and Women’s) to a pioneer post in Rhode Island’s first HMO (RIGHA), and eventually commandeering the state’s largest reproductive health surgi-center, my respect for those who heal has become boundless. Social services, maintenance and dietary staffs work in quiet chorus and respectful concern as the overburdened but omnipresent nursing staff — the sentinels of healing — monitor the unimaginable magic performed by the blessed medical and surgical teams.

Personal miracles wait to be recognized all along the healing curve. I celebrate daily tasks long taken for granted, until they were temporarily lost in my post–surgery inability. Suddenly I can latch my shoe buckle, or get into or out of bed on my own. I am rediscovering — slowly — the miracle of walking without assistance. I am now bonded with millions who have never been able to tie their shoes, walk alone, feed themselves, or generally navigate their world independently.

My mother valued independence as part of her obsession with avoiding debt in all its forms. She raised me on mantras of self-sufficiency: “Never be subject to anyone” and, my favorite, “Never owe anyone: it’s always better if people owe you!” Such mandates may build strength of character, but they make it difficult to ask for a bedpan, a wheelchair, or pain medication without worrying about creating a debt.

Once home (48 hours after surgery), visiting nurses and physical therapists help me heal and thrive again. Still, the image of others who were not so lucky lingers — people struggling daily with life’s demands that require a mobility they do not have, perhaps have never had, and may never hope to enjoy. Some will never cross the finish line that I am approaching daily.

Every person — and writers in particular — should appreciate life’s precious lessons. Human emotions and challenges we may all confront eventually are windows to understanding the common human condition.

Once healed, I shall return to Italy, as I do each summer. People ask if I have visited this or that church where some miracle is alleged to have occurred. I reply that I volunteer in a food bank for Italy’s homeless, or visit a shelter in Rome where abused women were being kept safe long before Hollywood invented #MeToo.

In these places, where I can give back, I put my gratitude to work helping others overcome physical and emotional challenges. My brief flirtation with disability helps me appreciate their lot. To be truly whole again, I must settle the debt I have to them, as my mother mandates.

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Mary Ann Sorrentino (thatmaryann@yahoo.com), a monthly contributor to the Providence Journal, writes from RI and Fla., and, in summer, from Italy. 

Feminist Finish Line In View

Senior “feminists” long ago became immune to derision and disrespect. However articulate or polite our arguments for women’s equal treatment, we saw more winks and elbowing than sympathy from too many men. Stepford Wives opposed to feminism accused us of evil instincts, and worse.

I went to a private Catholic girls grammar school (Convent of the Sacred Heart) run by nuns in full nun gear — long black gowns, tight starched white linen helmets covering their heads, from which floor-length veils flowed. A crucifix the size of a fist hung mid-chest, like a hood ornament warning of the fury behind it.

We endured white-glove ceremonies, Mrs. Hadley’s diction classes, “courtesy” seminars on “manners,” and endless lectures on how (female) “children of the Sacred Heart” behaved.

Still, I doubted Jesus was a misogynist.

I transferred to Classical High — a public school my former Reverend Mother called the “Protestant school [I] chose of [my] own free will” (in cahoots with the Holy Spirit).

There I breathed the air of equity, as students, whatever their gender, competed on the level academic playing field. With the will to hone one’s intellectual ability, everyone could excel!

At Elmira College in New York, I was hostage to President J. Ralph Murray, who treated the all-women students like children. Emerging as a full-blown crazed conservative by senior year, he stuffed students’ mailboxes with paperback copies of “None Dare Call it Treason,” by John Stormer. A cover note explained that if the book generated pro-Goldwater support in the 1964 presidential elections, “the donor” would be happy. I organized my first book burning. The New York Times covered it.

I became a welfare social worker. My supervisor yelled at my clients for “wasting money” buying frozen broccoli vs. fresh. My caseload included more than 100 women getting government Aid for Dependent Children. Still he screamed, “Catholic taxpayers aren’t paying your salary to have you teach clients birth control!”

By 1985, my public excommunication by a Catholic bishop (of questionable purity) targeted me as director of Rhode Island’s Planned Parenthood, a contraceptive clinic providing physical exams, pap smears, sex education, and also abortions. Of particular bad judgment was the Diocese’s attempt (unsuccessful) to bar our teenaged daughter from her confirmation.

I cut my feminist teeth on Catholic oppression of girls by nuns, and I touched the stars of my feminism when the (male) Canon Law Society of America exonerated me, saying the banished bishop should know better.

Yet, only now, with millions of women taking to the streets, naming oppressors and abusers openly, and millions more wielding power as senators, generals, working moms, Supreme Court justices, surgeons, engineers and astronauts, do I weep with joy — the finish line in view.

I shall die fighting for women’s rights, as I have lived fighting for them. We still have t’s to cross and i’s to dot, but, finally, we “old guard” here — and sisters watching from that ultimate rally in the sky — cheer our daughters and granddaughters taking their rightful, deserved place, thinking, “Well done!”

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Mary Ann Sorrentino (thatmaryann@yahoo.com), a monthly contributor, writes from R.I.  and Florida, and, in summer, from Italy.