Today's post is from Patricia Harman, author of The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir. Harman got her start as a lay-midwife on the rural communes where she lived in the '60s and '70s, going on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons. In the interest of privacy, the names and some identifying details of the women she discusses in this post have been changed.
Willa Burr, a forty-eight-year-old West Virginian, was a housekeeper and a darn fine one. She made good money too; a little over $14.00 an hour on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays for two doctors' families and a single middle-aged teacher. The rest of the week, she stayed home with her three-year-old granddaughter.
Darrell, her husband, had retired early, when the shirt factory at the edge of town closed. He worked on an addition to their house on Taylor Mountain, a little at a time, when they could afford lumber. He had diabetes and took the medication he got at the free clinic. When the snow was too bad, he drove Willa down the steep mountain, in his four-wheel-drive truck, into the suburbs for her cleaning jobs.
Life was pretty good on their two acres, what with Willa's pay and Darrell's Social Security, until Willa's knees gave out. First Mrs. Haddock let her go. That's the urologist's wife. She said Willa was missing too much work, but there was only that once when Willa and Dave had to go to South Carolina for two weeks to help their son, and the other time when Willa had the flu.
The real reason Mrs. Haddock fired Willa was she couldn't get down on knees on the tile floors anymore, and the dusting was deteriorating too. Then Dr. Kepler said he didn't need her either. That left Miss Robinson, the second grade teacher, and when Willa noticed her hands were shaking and walking was difficult, she gave up cleaning altogether and just stayed home. Maybe she'd been working too hard, was what Darrell said.
After that things went downhill. Willa's daughter, Tina, a secretary in an accountant's office, took her mom down to the low-income clinic, staffed by students, residents, and faculty from a nearby medical school, but they couldn't find anything wrong. Then, even though the Burr's couldn't afford it, Willa and Darrell made an appointment at the Patterson Family Health Center to see a young Doc who wore a gold cross around his neck and a cashmere sweater. He wasn't much help.
The medical bill, from the clinic was $565, counting lab work. The doctor with the gold cross said he was pretty sure Willa had Parkinson's disease and wanted to order more tests, maybe a CAT scan of her brain, but Willa refused. She didn't have the money. And she couldn't pay for a trial of medication either.
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Three weeks ago I went to pick up my son, Liko, from preschool and found his class gathered outside the school, waiting for the mommies and daddies.
