Tests and portraits

As I get older I notice that when older people get together, they often bring up their medical issues, their aches and pains, their recent operations.  I myself loathe talking about such things with strangers, and hate hospitals and being sick with a grand passion.  (I know, everybody probably feels the same way about being sick and hospitals.)

But of course, getting older means that things do begin failing and changing, and I am talking about this now only to illustrate kindness in this, my newly adopted country, Portugal.  

My grandpa smoking a pipe with his boy,
my incredibly young dad, sporting very
funny hair. 

I have been a pretty constant and unwilling visitor to doctor's offices and hospitals all my life, because I inherited my grandfather's lungs, which were thought to have become problematic after being mustard-gassed in the trenches of the Somme during the "great war".  But I think they were probably pretty bad to begin with and his lung problems were exacerbated by the gassing.  This kind of asthma seems genetic, as several of my family members of three generations suffer from asthma, some being worse-off than others. 

A painting I did of Childhood. 
Notice the lungs/elephant ears.

When I was a little girl there were no great medical solutions for my illness, so with flu and exercise-induced asthma, I spent quite a large amount of my young life struggling for breath, and quite often our irritable doctor, who also happened to be my godmother, would at last give me what seemed always to be the last option, an injection (what it was I still haven't been able to find out), which  basically knocked me out like an anaesthetic.  

How it felt. (ipad drawing)

I suppose the reasoning was that if your entire body is relaxed, those little airways would also relax, enabling the breath.  They were the strangest experiences though, because it was like being thrown down a black hole, from which I would slowly rise up, hours and hours later.  I would dazedly walk through to the toilet from my room, and after doing the longest wee ever, would gaze into the mirror above the bathroom sink for ages, examining my face.  Was this the same Anne Radford that I knew? And if not, who was I?  How could I find myself again?  

In 1990 someone invented inhaled corticosteroids, which changed my life (also that of my younger daughter who sadly inherited those damn lungs as well).  

Anyway, since 2020 I have had a pulmonologist checking up on me so I had to find a Portuguese pulmonologist, who ordered tests.  

For the Pulmonary Lung Function test, you have to sit in a kind of clear airtight box with clips on your nose and perform various breathing exercises, which involve various kinds of torture for an asthmatic - like having to wheeze out all your breath from lungs which have no more breath left long before the technician gives the signal to breath in again.  Before which point you come to believe that you are about to faint, start seeing the blackness behind your eyes, and, after the third attempt, go into full-blown panic!  

Upon which, the incredibly sweet Filipa comes to your rescue, opens the horrible claustrophobic door and leads you out into the light, walks you around, tells you you're fine, puts her arm around your shoulder and gives you all her strength.  

When you go back in, you know she is with you, she maintains eye contact the entire time, she talks with her low sweet Portuguese-accented words, tells you she is with you, but that it is you who are strong, you who can do it, push that air all out, all out, you can do it, it's you! .....  Okay breathe in!

And I did, and I could!  

When it was done, she took me out of the box and gave me a huge hug. She was tall, like a friendly tree, and my head fitted on her shoulder, and I cried a little from all her humanity.  

The kindness of strangers was something which decided us on this new country of ours, and this is just one example of so many experiences we have had.  

Ella and the dove

Recently I have been loving making block-prints, which were always such a surprising delight for my students at the International School.  In fact, most people remember doing lino-prints at school, I think it is a stand-out memory of school art.  The mirror image of what you have drawn and carved out, and the myriad ways you can print.  Magic.  

I made a block of my granddaughter Ella who is a dreamy book-loving child, so I chose a mourning dove to sit with her, because they are symbols of peace and loyalty, and are also very pragmatic birds, as is she (pragmatic, not a bird.)  [Fun fact about doves which has nothing to do with Ella, is that they are rare among birds as they can suck up water using their beaks like a straw, unlike other birds which have to tilt their heads back to drink.]

Luna and the magpie

Then I made one of Luna, using a magpie as her bird, as they are curious about everything, and talk and sing a lot!  Luna is all those things too!

I had to carve out the cheeks and foreheads very deeply so that no ink could seep in there, because both girls are 11 with those still-perfect faces.  

After Luna, I decided to do a self-portrait, because although I have done about a hundred self-portraits over the years, I have never done a block-print one.  I didn't have to carve out deeply, because at 69 my face is filled with laughter-lines and worry-wrinkles and sun-spots and just all the usual ways in which skin shows its age.

Me with red hair

I chose a hoopoe (a name which has always evoked laughter amongst the youngest in our family and even more for its binomial name Upupa epops africana) as my bird, because they are a lovely henna sienna-brown, which my hair was for the majority of my adult life. 

Anne and the hoopoe

A version of this bird lives in Portugal, the Eurasian hoopoe, but I first met them when I was a child, as they are South African birds too, and my heart will always be with that country, which built my bones, which made my fragile, tough, caring, brave, sensitive, passionate soul.