Catherine Could Use a Hand

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Have you ever met a person truly magnetic? Someone who makes the air seem light and yet you feel the pull of their gravity as they walk through the room? True charisma isn’t a salesman or a televangelist or even a politician. It doesn’t have to be loud and it doesn’t have to catalyze great social movements. But it changes causally the physics of the room in which it inhabits.

This is how I would choose to begin to describe Catherine Mitchell. A common name for an uncommon person. If you don’t mind, I would like to take a moment to tell you more about this person that I love.

She is a fae creature. A true unicorn wandering the earth in the guise of a beautiful woman. Magic and colors pour out of her and infect the people around her. I know I sound like I am deeply exaggerating, but I have known Catherine for 15 years and this impression has never faded. In fact, it’s become stronger over time. In the age of bureaucracy and economy, industry and institution: banality! She is engaged in an accidental project to re-mystify the world. Things seem possible. There’s always another adventure to be had. Unexplored territory is up ahead! Look! A butterfly!

Catherine is a transwoman who is living in the Northeast trying to make her way through the world like some sort of modern Mary Tyler Moore / manic pixie dream girl.

Having faced an uphill battle to become herself, she is adamant to respond to others with quiet understanding, curiosity, and a lack of judgment that is nearly amoral in her fervent desire to make as big a space for other people and their experiences as possible. For that reason, Catherine has given so many people a pathway to self-love just through being herself in the world.

Her hair is often blue/purple. She rides a motorcycle. She runs marathons.

Her nickname in school was the goat, and that doesn’t mean greatest of all time, she would never accept that label for anything, but because she seems to have a preternatural ability not to fall off of things. Fine and large motor skills, balance, sense of direction, general understanding of herself in space/time. This results in her being a decent snowboarder, an excellent hiker/climber, and pretty well good at everything she does physically. Remember Zoe Bell from the movie Death Proof? That’s basically her. I might call her a dryad instead of a goat. Or maybe she’s a fawn.

She is a software engineer who just can’t stand to not improve the design/code so the next person doesn’t have crufty crap. She can fall asleep anywhere when she is tired because she is just so comfortable in her own skin. But she gets dehydrated easily, so she always has a bottle of water with her. She can eat anything and in any combination. Back to that fae creature thing, I once came in the middle of the night and she had lined up all the condiments in the refrigerator from what she thought would be the mildest to the most intense/spicy and was taking teaspoon bites of each one and then clearing her pallet to taste the next. A wide-eyed innocence that causes fascination and true out of the box thinking defines her. And it’s infectious. She and the world she is in are wondrous and full of possibilities.

At least, that is what she was like. Until, on the fresh, cold morning of the first day of the New Year, 2023, she got on her motorcycle for a leisurely ride in the country to start the year off right, she was t-boned by a car in an intersection.

Catherine was in a coma for a few days and remained unconscious for a further week. She suffered a sheering traumatic brain injury, of the type that causes “Regarding Henry” type brain damage. Some bones in her neck were broken and were thrust through her voice box. She suffered a contusion to the mid-spine which causes massive swelling around her spinal cord.

Catherine can no longer eat what she wants anytime. Her body has forgotten how to tell her when she is hungry and often doesn’t tell her when it’s time to evacuate her bowels.

Catherine sometimes now has debilitating cramps as she realizes that her body has failed to remind her of thirst for more than a day at a time.

Catherine can still fall asleep anywhere, but it is very difficult to wake her up. And she sleeps 17 hours a day.

She can no longer program or code. She has a hard time holding any recall and organizing her thoughts over time and organizing processes into steps. Plus, her hands no longer fully obey her brain’s commands and she cannot move from the middle to the pinky fingers almost at all. She can only hunt and peck on the keyboard.

Her legs likewise don’t seem to want to obey. She is unstable like a baby goat now instead of a full grown mountain mama. She cannot stand in the shower. She cannot take stairs. She falls all the time. She cannot snowboard, she cannot hike, she cannot climb, she cannot run, and she no longer owns a motorcycle.

Her hair is dry and her curls are unkempt and frizzy with no sign of the vibrant colors that are so distinctive to her persona.

And the worst is, she is very aware of these changes. The brain trauma has caused a runaway chemical depression. She cannot lift her own spirits nor anyone else’s. Friends reach out to return the favor, and she turns them away out of shame.

And Catherine is having a hard time expressing who she is because there has been a big interruption in her hormones. And she cannot speak in anything but a whisper because her vocal chords are still disrupted.

And if all that sounds terrible, I can tell you that there is great hope of recovery because she has actually improved SO MUCH since the accident. A continued upward trend. The brain swelling continues to go down as does the spinal swelling. Her throat is no longer almost completely obstructed and she no longer has a tracheotomy.

But now comes the part where I think you will get angry, because I am angry. The hope is that with physical therapy, with emotional therapy, with chemical therapy, with serious medical/surgical interventions, we can see very great improvement. But Catherine was between contracts and had no medical insurance. Emergency Medicaid has helped but the medical bills are about as high as you can imagine. She has applied for disability which she will almost certainly get, but it takes months to get each appointment in the process for this. It has now been almost a year and she is about to have a mental status exam, about halfway through the process. She has no more savings. She has used all of her credit. Her family is not in the picture. She cannot afford food, or internet, or rent. Her broken body sleeps on another’s charity (I hope you won’t judge her based on my dramatic writing style, but honestly, my heart hurts so much). I and others are giving all the help we can afford, but as you can imagine, in this economy, we are getting tapped out waiting for government aid.

I have created this page because I think that some people might be willing to help a little bit. Especially if I remind you that even a tiny bit helps. A package of Ramen is 67 cents where she is. Scrambled eggs and toast and sliced tomato, some basic food stuffs, can cost less around 1.50 per meal. That’s so cheap! So, I am hoping that if enough people help her eat some eggs and toast, we can get her to the end of the disability process where at least the emergency level funding will be taken care of.

I have so much hope for her and her recovery and I just know that she will bring this experience with her to even greater depths of empathy and understanding to others. She’s so strong and working so hard! But I am trying with all of my might to keep the insult to injury, the trauma after the trauma, from being unbearable. I don’t want her little fairy light snuffed out of the world. She’s in the endurance marathon of her life.