My great grandma A’mooh who was born and reared at Paguate, and drank the radioactive spring water much of her life, lived past her ninety-eighth birthday. She told my mother that as a young woman she had survived an appendicitis without Western medicine. That seemed impossible without penicillin or antibiotics, so I wondered about the story until a few years ago.
Then I became a patient of Dr. Roberto Zamudio Millán who immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the 1960s. On my first visit I wanted him to know that I wasn’t impressed with Western European medicine so I told him that my great grandmother had survived an appendicitis without doctors, hospitals or penicillin.
To my delight, Dr. Zamudio Millán responded to my story with another story. While he was in medical school he found a book written by a doctor who worked in a small town in the mountains of the State of Chihuahua in 1920. The people traveled considerable distances on foot to obtain medical care in the town, and in emergencies family members came for the doctor to take him to their house where a loved one lay ill.
So a family brought the doctor to their modest home in an Indian village high in the mountains to take a look at their old granny who was feverish and quite ill. The doctor told the old woman’s family they had to get her down to the clinic hospital in town at once for surgery or she would die of a burst appendix. The old woman refused to go to the hospital. So the doctor returned to the town, and a few days later they came again and said she was very ill now and again the doctor went and again she refused the hospital.
A week or two went by and the doctor heard no more from the family of the old woman, and the doctor thought she was dead by now. Then the following week, the doctor saw two of the old woman’s sons and when he cautiously inquired about her, certain she must have died, her sons said, “Oh she’s just fine; strong as ever.” They told the doctor that the fever went down and she asked for the bedpan. Then she told them she was hungry and wanted to eat.
A few weeks later the doctor went to the village. When the old woman saw the doctor she yelled at him, “You don’t know anything! See, I’m still alive. I didn’t need your hospital!”
Dr. Zamudio Millán said that in extremely rare cases, before the appendix ruptured, the body formed a membrane around the infected matter inside the appendix so it was encapsulated and then the large intestine passed it harmlessly. That was Dr. Zamudio Millán’s explanation of how my great grandma survived appendicitis without doctors and antibiotics. He completely won me over with that story so I see him on those rare occasions when acupuncture and herbs don’t work.
After John Silko and the boys and I returned to Laguna from Alaska in 1975, we lived with Grandma Lillie in her house with my father who’d moved back from Palm Springs. I needed a quiet place to write so I set up an office in my great grandma’s old house. My great grandpa Marmon’s work table with a drawer was there; he’d had it made out of the oak shipping crates he saved.
Only one room was habitable, Grandma A’mooh’s old bedroom. There was electricity for my typewriter. I loved it because I’d spent my happiest hours as a child with Grandma A’mooh there. Out the window the old swing was still there; the morning glories and bridal bush were gone but I replanted the morning glories and hollyhocks the first chance I got.
Later we fixed up Grandma A’mooh’s old house and moved in. It was while we were living there in 1977 that I suffered a misdiagnosed ectopic pregnancy that almost killed me. Four different doctors called it the “flu,” but every day I got weaker and shorter of breath. One night as I slept in Grandma A’mooh’s old parlor, I had a dream that was not visual but aural. A voice said “A flu like this one could kill you.” The voice I dreamed didn’t sound like her voice but I knew it was her.
The morning after the dream, Grandma Lillie came to check on me. I was sitting at the kitchen table and I looked up at her as she walked in the door. She looked at me and she said, “Leslie, you’re dying,” and I said, “Grandma, I know.”
I drove to Albuquerque to the doctor who thought I had the flu. I told him I was weaker; I told him I thought it might be something uterine, and he sent me to the specialist who ordered a sonogram that revealed the ruptured ectopic pregnancy.
The rupture had occurred on October second; the correct diagnosis was finally made on November second, All Souls’ Day or Day of the Dead. By that time I had lost a great deal of blood, I was very weak, and the specialist told me I was a poor risk for surgery but without the surgery I’d die.
I was diagnosed late in the afternoon and wasn’t able to get to a telephone until early evening. I was only able to call a few people to tell them about the emergency surgery, and these were people who lived out of state or a great distance from Albuquerque.
By the time I was admitted to the hospital and John Silko had driven the fifty miles back to Laguna to tell my father, grandmother and the boys, it was too late at night for him to return. I told John Silko to stay at Laguna with my father and Grandma Lillie to comfort the boys.
I learned a great deal the evening and night of November second as they hurried the blood transfusions I needed before surgery. The other bed in the hospital room was empty. My mother, my sister Wendy and my friend Mei-Mei all lived out of state or a hundred miles away, so they telephoned me.
I don’t remember what we talked about that night. In my rational thoughts I understood there was a strong chance I’d die in surgery the next morning and this was my last night in this world. But in my irrational hopefulness (I was twenty-eight and Viking Press had published my first novel Ceremony only three months earlier) I felt I would survive, that I would live although the doctor saw it otherwise. As sick and weak as I was, I didn’t feel I was dying though I was; probably we humans always die thinking we aren’t dying.
Except for the telephone calls I was alone that night before the surgery. I brought along the sweater I was knitting for Cazimir who was five. I kept knitting that night even though I couldn’t finish the sweater before the surgery. Somehow I felt I’d be able to finish the sweater — completely irrational under the circumstances.
The close call changed my consciousness of myself and my life in a fundamental way; it made me understand how short my time in this world might be. Later my friend Ishmael Reed said the reason I didn’t die was because I had more books to write.
In some ways the person I’d been before November 3, 1977 did die that day. I woke from the surgery with a profound sense of responsibility for how I lived my life. I did have more books I wanted to write but not if I stayed where I was. My writing was a source of tension in the marriage, and the teaching and other duties stood in the way. So I moved to Tucson in early January of 1978, two months after the emergency surgery.
PART TWO Rattlesnakes
CHAPTER 14
I came to live at this old ranch house in the Tucson Mountains, and before long the desert terrain and all its wonderful beings and even the weather won my heart.
So many of the plants and shrubs and the birds and snakes of the Sonoran desert were unfamiliar — I had a wonderful time reading and learning about them as I watched them outside my house. I knew it might be some time before I knew this desert well enough to write about it.