KDKA Investigates: New Major Health Crisis Facing America's Military, Some Say: Some are calling it this generation's 'Agent Orange' -- a new, major health crisis facing America's military.
Showing posts with label Bethany Bugay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bethany Bugay. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 09, 2017
Continuing Questions about Iraq War ‘Burn Pits’
For anyone who is interested, I was featured in a local news story, which was very well done, concerning the possibility that my wife's leukemia has a link to the military's practice of burning trash and human waste with diesel fuel:
KDKA Investigates: New Major Health Crisis Facing America's Military, Some Say: Some are calling it this generation's 'Agent Orange' -- a new, major health crisis facing America's military.
KDKA Investigates: New Major Health Crisis Facing America's Military, Some Say: Some are calling it this generation's 'Agent Orange' -- a new, major health crisis facing America's military.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
I’m writing my wife’s life story in 2016
Hi all – this is a personal note. I know, it’s New Year’s Eve – everybody’s probably making plans for 2016. I’ve made my own plans (fully aware of Proverbs 16:9). I’ve set up a new blog (http://bethanybugay.com/) that’s going to be devoted to a project that will involve writing first of all my wife’s life story, and also, our life together.
Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice is that the names don’t match up (Bethany Bugay vs DelNita Airel). Well, we struggled with that the whole time, and I think I explain it (and thanks to Alan Kurshner for help with the Hebrew). Another thing you’ll notice is that there’s some cussing involved. Well, my wife was a Soldier. The first word I ever heard come out of her mouth was “Goddammit!” – I intend to be as honest as I can about the whole thing.
Steve said something a while ago about a Christian marriage being counter-cultural in our day. At one point in her life, Beth saw “a Christian marriage” as almost a kind of salvation from the kind of hell that her life had become, almost from the outset. I think it’s a story that needs to be told today.
Here is the first chapter.
Here is the Facebook page I’ve set up: https://www.facebook.com/BethanyBugay/.
If anyone’s interested, please help me out by visiting the Facebook page – liking it, sharing it, talking it up. I hope to publish on a semi-regular schedule there, so please check back and like, share, and talk up those future chapters as well.
I know some of y’all probably miss me grousing about Roman Catholicism. I’ve got plenty of that left in me, I assure you. But this is, in my view, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (that I have) to tell an extraordinarily moving story of Christ’s redemption (Spoiler alert for those who like to read ahead: my wife, a life-long though nominal Roman Catholic, made a credible profession of faith before she died).
I couldn’t write it any earlier than this because it was just too painful. But now, with some distance, the grief has subsided a bit, but the project is still fresh in my mind, and I have a sense that if I don’t do it now, I won’t get back to it later.
So here it is, warts and all. My cousin (who is 70) read the first chapter, and she said “I read your first draft with tears falling down”. There is a saying by the poet Robert Frost – “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”. Well, there have been plenty of tears on this end, and as I work through this, I expect that there will be many more.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
“Be Weird. Be Random.”
I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time on Facebook these days.
When I set my wife up with a Facebook account, after she came home from the hospital following her bone marrow transplant, I had connected her with maybe 100 of my friends from church and work. She took a liking to it. By adding her work friends, her old military friends, and friends from a Stephen King fan club group, she built her network of friends to more than 500. (She’s down to only 300 friends now. That could be my influence, or the influence of her death, or maybe both. How would we test something like that?)
A handwritten note that I found showed what she liked about Facebook: she could contact anyone, any time.
I’ve been posting frequently to her Facebook timeline. Facebook enables you to “memorialize” an account; so her account now is “Remembering Bethany Bugay” (and I would encourage you to visit there and look around to see what I’m talking about).
She was a remarkable woman in many ways. She kept journals throughout her life, and I’ve been finding and working my way through some of them. I’ve thought about writing more about her life, and a number of her Facebook friends have asked me to continue writing about her.
I may or may not continue to do that. Some of the things I’m finding have not been flattering, in a way that I’ll try to describe below.
Elsewhere, where Facebooks suggests friends, one of them was a person named “Gifted Dreamdancer”, a friend of one of my wife’s friends whose profile photo appeared to be a meme that featured someone nearing the edge of a cliff, and this saying:
My thought was, if this person were truly “gifted”, he or she would understand that “weird” and “random” are not commensurate with being gifted. If you are hiding “weirdness” or “randomness”, what would make this person think that that is what you truly are? Certainly, it is a lack of a Christian viewpoint, which would hold that “what you truly are” is “created in the image of God”. And that a true gift is a kindness; it is not something that should seek to distort or to be harmful in any way.
And yet this type of attitude – wrongheaded as we would see it – is actually quite widespread in our culture. It brought to mind an Avril Lavigne song that featured this “lost-and-wandering” message:
More straightforwardly, this kind of confusion was described in a song about Marilyn Monroe:
I say these things to note that, before we met, my wife had this kind of characteristic in her life. She had been sexually abused as a child, and not only as a small child, but on a continuing basis. She ran away from this, but the very act of running away set off a chain of events that got her into even more trouble, which I would say, shaped the rest of her entire life.
Beth not only kept journals, but cards and letters and other memorabilia as well. When we were married, I actively stayed away from these people (and I certainly didn’t want Beth to contact them – old boyfriends included).
But now that she is gone, I’m finding that I have a kind of curiosity to “fill in the gaps”, to add pieces to the puzzle that I had not found before. Really, to understand what made her tick. I’ve contacted several of the individuals who played a role in her earlier life, and virtually all of them have said, in one way or another, “we were young”, as a way of explaining away some of the really stupid and harmful things that they did. One person said that she was “spontaneous”.
When you’re young, that’s decidedly NOT the time to “be weird” or “be random”. In your youth is precisely time to “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth”. The reason for this, according to the writer of Ecclesiastes, is because “the evil days [will] come” and “the years [will] draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’”.
In your youth is the time to understand that you are capable of making very bad decisions that can affect the rest of your life. Since, as young people, you have most of your life yet to live, for that reason, you have the very most to lose as well.
Beth was abused, and that led her to get herself into a position to make decisions that affected her life for the rest of her life. One thing led to another, setting off a chain of events that led her to the military in 1980, to the military again in 2002, got her deployed to Iraq, exposed to Benzene, which caused her leukemia, and led to her eventual early death.
She made bad decisions, but others, instead of legitimately caring for her, took advantage of her, and took what they could for themselves of her bad decisions. The results, I find, were devastating, in more ways than one.
When I set my wife up with a Facebook account, after she came home from the hospital following her bone marrow transplant, I had connected her with maybe 100 of my friends from church and work. She took a liking to it. By adding her work friends, her old military friends, and friends from a Stephen King fan club group, she built her network of friends to more than 500. (She’s down to only 300 friends now. That could be my influence, or the influence of her death, or maybe both. How would we test something like that?)
A handwritten note that I found showed what she liked about Facebook: she could contact anyone, any time.
I’ve been posting frequently to her Facebook timeline. Facebook enables you to “memorialize” an account; so her account now is “Remembering Bethany Bugay” (and I would encourage you to visit there and look around to see what I’m talking about).
She was a remarkable woman in many ways. She kept journals throughout her life, and I’ve been finding and working my way through some of them. I’ve thought about writing more about her life, and a number of her Facebook friends have asked me to continue writing about her.
I may or may not continue to do that. Some of the things I’m finding have not been flattering, in a way that I’ll try to describe below.
Elsewhere, where Facebooks suggests friends, one of them was a person named “Gifted Dreamdancer”, a friend of one of my wife’s friends whose profile photo appeared to be a meme that featured someone nearing the edge of a cliff, and this saying:
“Be Weird. Be Random. Be Who You Are. Because You Never Know Who Would Love The Person You Hide”.
My thought was, if this person were truly “gifted”, he or she would understand that “weird” and “random” are not commensurate with being gifted. If you are hiding “weirdness” or “randomness”, what would make this person think that that is what you truly are? Certainly, it is a lack of a Christian viewpoint, which would hold that “what you truly are” is “created in the image of God”. And that a true gift is a kindness; it is not something that should seek to distort or to be harmful in any way.
And yet this type of attitude – wrongheaded as we would see it – is actually quite widespread in our culture. It brought to mind an Avril Lavigne song that featured this “lost-and-wandering” message:
Isn't anyone trying to find me?
Won't somebody come take me home?
It's a damn cold night
Trying to figure out this life
Won't you take me by the hand?
Take me somewhere new
I don't know who you are
But I... I'm with you
I'm with you
More straightforwardly, this kind of confusion was described in a song about Marilyn Monroe:
And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in …
I say these things to note that, before we met, my wife had this kind of characteristic in her life. She had been sexually abused as a child, and not only as a small child, but on a continuing basis. She ran away from this, but the very act of running away set off a chain of events that got her into even more trouble, which I would say, shaped the rest of her entire life.
Beth not only kept journals, but cards and letters and other memorabilia as well. When we were married, I actively stayed away from these people (and I certainly didn’t want Beth to contact them – old boyfriends included).
But now that she is gone, I’m finding that I have a kind of curiosity to “fill in the gaps”, to add pieces to the puzzle that I had not found before. Really, to understand what made her tick. I’ve contacted several of the individuals who played a role in her earlier life, and virtually all of them have said, in one way or another, “we were young”, as a way of explaining away some of the really stupid and harmful things that they did. One person said that she was “spontaneous”.
When you’re young, that’s decidedly NOT the time to “be weird” or “be random”. In your youth is precisely time to “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth”. The reason for this, according to the writer of Ecclesiastes, is because “the evil days [will] come” and “the years [will] draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’”.
In your youth is the time to understand that you are capable of making very bad decisions that can affect the rest of your life. Since, as young people, you have most of your life yet to live, for that reason, you have the very most to lose as well.
Beth was abused, and that led her to get herself into a position to make decisions that affected her life for the rest of her life. One thing led to another, setting off a chain of events that led her to the military in 1980, to the military again in 2002, got her deployed to Iraq, exposed to Benzene, which caused her leukemia, and led to her eventual early death.
She made bad decisions, but others, instead of legitimately caring for her, took advantage of her, and took what they could for themselves of her bad decisions. The results, I find, were devastating, in more ways than one.
Monday, June 08, 2015
Bethany Bugay, 1960-2015
She had a very difficult recovery from that, but she seemed to have recovered completely after a while. Indeed, these last three years have been a beautiful time for us, a true gift.
Recently, she has been feeling very good and healthy (after almost three years of being totally sedentary), and she started doing work in the yard. I think this became the thing that ultimately killed her.
She worked in an “assisted care” living center – not quite a nursing home where patients required medical care, but they were old and frail enough to require lots of other care. She loved the people she cared for, and because of her medical training, she was even able to save a few lives through the magic of CPR.
She had worked the prior evening, from Thursday night to Friday morning. She came home and slept, as she usually did, and I put in most of a day’s work. (I work at home). She got up, we chatted around the house, I was getting droopy, so we laid down to watch TV and we both dozed.
I slept about a half hour – she cuddled up close to me and we just fell asleep watching a Mafia documentary on NetFlix. (She was a prolific TV watcher). When I got up, I made some more phone calls. By 5:00 when I was done, she was up and about. I poked my head in the bedroom, and she said, “I hope you don’t mind, I ate all of the cabbage soup you made (it was a one-time experiment, making cabbage soup. But she loved it).
We went outside for a bit; we talked a bit about what I had been doing at work; she smoked a cigarette. She has been enjoying life greatly the last couple of years. In recent weeks, she has felt strong enough to do some yard work for the first time in years. (And of course, she loved protecting her yard work and garden from the local vermin). She had been digging up Yucca plants, and if you go to her Facebook page, you’ll see that she had posted photos of this titanic struggle. I think the combination of her sedentary life these last years, and the new (and quite determined) exertions led to the heart attack.
While we were talking, she said, “I feel funny”. It seemed as if her heart started racing, she got cold and clammy. She said “I have to go to the bathroom”. While she was sitting on the toilet, she said, “get me a baby aspirin, and call 911”. I said, “are you sure?” She said “yes”. She knew what was happening. I hesitated because we don’t have good insurance, and I wanted to see if it would pass.
I got the aspirin and water for her. She went into the bed to lie down, but all she could do was to crumple in a pile on the bed. She said “I can’t move”. That’s when I got the phone and called 911. In the meantime, she had gone back into the bathroom. I found her on the toilet, and she said, “I think I crapped myself”. While I was on the phone with 911, they were asking me for symptoms, so I was asking her. And she was telling me ... “sudden heart rate, shallow breathing, cold, clammy skin, a pain in the center of my back”. I tried to gently rub her back. 911 told me the ambulance was on their way and so I put the phone down and went back to help her.
She said, “I’m going to have to lie down, get some towels out of the cupboard, spread them out, and help me lie down here”.
When Beth was nine years old, her mother had the first episode that had led to her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. She was in a grocery store with her mom and her little sister, when her mother fell down and lost her bowels and made a mess. She was a little girl, asking for someone to help her mother, and no one seemed willing to help.
I got a blanked and rolled it up to make her head comfortable, then I got some scissors and proceeded to cut off her panties and clean her up with baby wipes. I had her all cleaned up; her head started to twitch. I could see that her eye had rolled up into her head and she took her last breath. I kissed her and said “I love you”. Then I heard the ambulance, and I ran out to get the attendant. I told her it had only been about 30 seconds since her last breath, and so they commenced CPR. They said that they had gotten a pulse maybe some 20 minutes down the line, but it didn’t matter.
More links:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/06/thoughts-on-25th-wedding-anniversary.html
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2011/12/christmas-day-2011.html
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/search?q=beth
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