About Me & Healing

I am a woman about to turn 50. I live in Windham, Maine with my husband, Mark, son Wesley, two dogs, and one small dragon (A real, live bearded one. He's handsome). Our 25-year-old daughter, Kari, is a world traveler and currently in Australia. Our 22-year-old son, Wesley, just graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in Marine Sciences and works as an associate scientist in a testing laboratory in Portland, Maine.

I am also a 7th grade English Language Arts teacher at Freeport Middle School in Freeport, Maine. (Yes, next to L.L. Bean). Prior to being a teacher and a mom, I worked in the news industry and got to witness the last great hurrah of the newspaper industry in print during the years I worked at The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.

Primarily, though, I am a writer. I have always been a writer. Teaching and working with my 13-year-old writers has been a natural fit.  This spring I started writing a blog which I named Every Middle Thing. The blog highlights the small, unexpected moments in a middle school classroom and tells what it's like to be a teacher standing in the midst of it all. My blog on teaching inspired the name for this blog,  Every Open Heart.

My SCAD and open heart surgery happened two years ago. Like many other survivors, I had no risk factors, low cholesterol and blood pressure, and no family history.

Though SCAD threw me emotionally for a loop, I have healed rapidly and have had no complications. I already had experience with healing and had a well-established spiritual practice in place to cope. When this one struck, as bizarre and frightening as it was, it was as if I was a trained athlete ready for the challenge with all my equipment in place. 

Nineteen years earlier, when I was 29, I had ulcerative colitis hit me like a freight train. I had no prior symptoms. It struck and I quickly went downhill, as my body did not respond to any treatment. Within months of my first symptom of UC, I was hemorrhaging. I ended up with a complete colectomy with small-intestine resection. It was one difficult year of healing as I was raising two young children. It left me with a lot of questions. How could I be so healthy and have this happen? I had gone through two easy pregnancies and natural births yet ended up with a long scar down my lower abdomen.

But I healed. I healed with flying colors. I had learned how from the very best, a champion healer, my dad.

My dad was a severe hemophiliac. He had survived a difficult childhood of dire bleeds and many hospitalizations. He and my grandparents learned to be proactive in his care and to work with the very best doctors at that time at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.

From an early age, I was my dad's nurse and helped him with the home transfusions he needed to make his blood clot. I also helped with medications, and icing and splinting when he had to cope with the pain and immobility due to bleeding in his joints. When he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion in the early 1980s, I watched him champion-on through the early treatments for the virus, and I helped as best as I could in my visits home from college. He inevitably died of AIDS when he was only 51 and I lost my best friend.

My favorite picture of my dad, Wayne Bigelow. It was hard to catch a picture of him unaware of the photographer. I caught this shot of him when I was a teenager using a large lens. He is looking out onto the lake through a screen door at a family camp.

So both the strength and the fragility of the human body are something I understand. I have always turned to all things spiritual to gain a perspective on the world and this business of being human. I was raised Christian in both the Episcopalian and Catholic traditions, but eventually gravitated toward Unity which speaks to me as a very practical form of Christian spirituality. When my SCAD happened, I already had a lifetime of physical and spiritual practice to draw from and I believe that is why I healed so fast from my particular event.

Today I have an interesting set of scars on the front of my body, two vertical lines that don't meet in the middle. But here I am. My mind still coughs up worries about another SCAD happening and so many questions. Is SCAD related to ulcerative colitis? Nope. Somehow related to the genetics of hemophilia? Nope. Each time the worries and questions come, I steer them toward the concept of keeping a healthy watch on myself and a healthy curiosity.  Everything beating away in there looks fabulous on EKG and echocardiogram. I've been CT scanned with contrast dye from head to torso, I've had all important things spied upon with ultrasound, and my genes checked. No fibromuscular dysplasia. No abnormalities. Remarkably healthy.

Last year a good friend gave me the gift of a reading with a spiritual astrologer. She told me that I had the astrological chart of someone who stands at the doorway between heaven and earth, between life and death, and that I understand both. She also said that I came to earth to be a communicator that helps others heal through my written and spoken word. She added that I have the chart of someone who will live to be as old as dirt! I don't know how old dirt is, but it all sounds good to me.

Here I am and here is this blog. - Kim Cowperthwaite