This is EAA week. For those of you not in Oshkosh, these three initials stand for experimental aircraft association. Pilots and air enthusiasts from all over the world fly or drive into Oshkosh for a week of museums, air shows, and connecting with others who share the same passions. That would not be me.
Many of you know my story. Or parts of it. A five-car pileup, blunt force trauma, a hole in my brain, concussion from the whiplash, moderate frontal and temporal brain damage, and a level-ten migraine. I’ve had a headache every day since.
My Hawaii doctor suggested that an emotional support dog would make a big difference. I told him no. A few months passed, and he brought it up a second time during an appointment. Again I refused. After eighteen months the struggle became too much, and I put in my two-week notice.
Without my income, we could no longer afford to live in paradise. In March of 2017, we moved from sunny Hawaii to cold, gloomy Oshkosh. Leaving a life I loved and starting over at age sixty-two was much harder than I expected. Besides my son, his wife, and their son, we didn’t know anyone and knew nothing about our new community. And that’s where this part of my story begins.
This week is an anniversary week. I never knew about EAA when we moved to Oshkosh in 2017. EAA is a much-loved institution, but for this suicidal woman who suffered from noise-induced migraines, it was a disaster.
One day in July, while my husband was working thirty miles away in Appleton, I decided to walk downtown and explore. The deafening noise of a flyover from EAA Air Adventure, something I had known nothing about before that day, resulted in instantaneous pain from the noise-induced migraine.
The pain was like a red-hot poker relentlessly being stabbed into my forehead. Unable to stand when the shaking made my legs wobbly, I sat in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the post office and sobbed. My brain was so broken that I thought there were Nazi planes overhead, and I was in blitz-ravaged London.
I sat on the summer-hot pavement, and no one stopped or asked me if I was okay. No one called the police. People walked around me as quickly as possible. When I was all cried out, I walked home to my empty house.
After the wreck I bought a set of knives, ostensibly for cooking, but that was not the reason. I had thought about pills, and every day I researched how many of each prescription drug I was on would I need to take to die. Using a sharp knife seemed so much easier.
The movers lost, broke, or stole most of what we had carefully decided to ship to Wisconsin to start our new lives. One of the missing boxes held the nearly new knives. My mind raced as I tried to come up with a plan because life truly was not worth living. I remember thinking that people in Oshkosh cared more about their dogs than they did about each other.
That was the moment I knew I did not trust myself to be alone. That was the day I decided I’d try a dog. If it didn’t help, at least my canine-loving husband would have a friend when I killed myself.
Yesterday was a tough day. The incessant droning of planes was unsettling to me. I was unfocused and unproductive and, as happens the third week of July every year, the noise brings up really bad memories.
I still miss my old life in Hawaii. I’ll probably never be headache- free. Coconut, the dog no one else wanted, has helped me to live in the present, to find joy in the most unexpected places, and to find purpose in my life.
Coconut never met the old Carmen. He loves this Carmen more than any person in his world. I guess that’s all that matters.
