Returning to California

in memoir •  7 years ago 

Warning: There is some pretty graphic description in this blog so if you are squeamish this episode is not for you:

After returning to California I chose to locate in Los Angeles, where I had a number of friends, associations I made during my previous residence in Lancaster. I found a great cheap 1 bedroom apartment over a garage in the Crenshaw area, where my friends lived.

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In 6 months my Army boyfriend got out of the Army and he wanted me to meet him in Chicago. Apparently he was wondering if he had done the right thing by breaking up with me. We spent a weekend together but our relationship did not gel and after I flew back to LA we never had any contact again.

The Los Angeles County Health Dept. was happy to hire any nurse with public health experience in the Army and I started to work immediately at the San Pedro office of the Health Dept. Driving on the Harbor Freeway every day (is it still there?) was a new grueling experience and after one year i was happy to be transferred to Huntington Park. My professional experience with the LA Health Dept was mostly with Spanish-speaking families—nutrition, immunizations, and following up other communicable disease including tuberculosis which was common among people from Mexico at that time. My skin test for Tbc converted from negative to positive during that time. This only means I was around someone ( and probably many people) who had active tuberculosis but I never had the disease myself. My social life was very active and I participated in one of first dating services in the US, organized by UCLA—this was 1965-6!

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During this time I became pregnant. Birth control methods were iffy and birth control pills were in existence then but not commonly used. My boyfriend was an ok guy but not someone I wanted to have a lasting relationship with. Besides, he was married (separated). I went to an OB-GYN Dr. but of course this was before Roe v. Wade and abortions were still illegal, even in California. The Dr. contemplated doing an abortion procedure on me but changed his mind as he could get have gotten in a lot of professional trouble. So I pressed my boyfriend to find someone who would do an illegal abortion. Just an aside: it never entered my mind to carry the pregnancy to term…having a baby at that time in my life was definitely not in my consciousness. I always planned to get married and have children but this was not in my radar. A quack doctor was located and I insisted my boyfriend pay for half the price which was $200 cash. ( He wasn’t going to help pay for it because he said it was my fault that I got pregnant!!) I made the appt. and I was scared when I drove alone to this dark apartment in a part of town I was not familiar with. The procedure the Quack used was to insert a rubber urinary catheter through the vagina and through the cervix ( pain pain pain) into the uterus. I want home alone and after several hours my uterus rejected the foreign object (the catheter) and I began to bleed. The uterine contents was expelled but I was still bleeding so I called my OB Dr. and he immediately admitted me to the small local hospital, did a D&C surgery procedure to stop the bleeding and gave me a round of antibiotics to prevent any infection from the quack abortion procedure. I recovered from the whole episode without any problem but to this day I tell as many people as I can that legal abortions must remain available. I was fortunate because I was a nurse and knew what to expect and contacted a real doctor quickly. It was not safe because the quack could have killed me. Women will be die if we do not continue having legal abortions. There are always women who do not wish to procreate and who will have abortions and there are unscrupulous people who will do botched abortions and kill women who are desperate.

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Wow, very well-written. I am sorry you had to experience this. Thanks for being a strong role model for me.

Thanks for your reply!

Wow, thank you for sharing your experience...
Am so happy you were able to come out of the situation strong.... a lot of women were not able to come out of such situation, i strongly agree with all you said and i am a supporter of legal abortion. Sometimes, birth control options may fail one and the lady doesnt have to bear the consequences if she isnt ready to... thanks for sharing and good luck

Thanks for your support

wow @jiggs I am glad you survived the Quack doctor..it is great you have so many photos .. love the way you write about your life.

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I survived and want people to know how it was in the days before Roe, and want people to know that the US cannot ever return to that time.

I graduated HS in 1973 so remember some of it ..the movie anyway and yes there are doctors that will do those botch jobs.

I'm glad you decided to share another episode in your life story! Even though this happened some years ago, maybe it was still hard to write. Good thing you were in the medical field and knew what to do in the aftermath of the procedure. I look forward to the next episode!

As an aside, I think the 60s were an interesting decade for music, and I wonder what you were listening to at the time. There were lots of bands in and around LA, like The Doors, Beach Boys, Steppenwolf, Standells, Seeds, Mamas and the Papas, etc. Probably a cool time and place to be!

thanks for sharing this post on Twitter! You're a gem!

Those you mentioned--not Steppenwolf,Standells, Seeds but listened to Simon & Garfunkel and probably ones I've forgotten or didn't make it out of LA. About 5 yrs ago i became a HUGE fan of Queen....I ran across their 1985 Wembley Stadium 1985 performance on YouTube and I was hooked. Somewhat odd for a 75 yr old, don't you agree?

You're a very cool 75 year old, so not odd at all!

It's interesting how Simon and Garfunkel released Sounds Of Silence as an acoustic song on their 1963 album which didn't do well, and then their label added electric overdubs and released it as a single in 1965 and it went to #1. I think The Beatles changed people's tastes in those 2 years!

Queen was another versatile band. They had some really heavy tunes in their early years but also some pop and Rockabilly. I'll have to look up their performance that you mentioned, thanks!

My conversion to Queen was 5 yrs ago. I'm now 80!!!

From reading your stories I see that you've been cool at every age and stage of your life! :-)

Thanks for your reply.

Such as sad 😞 story so happy 😀 better birth control options available so less women having to make that choice. Women should always be able to make life threatening decisions with their doctors without fear of retaliatory consequences for protecting their own lives.

YES!

( He wasn’t going to help pay for it because he said it was my fault that I got pregnant!!)

Seriously!

I was never very assertive before this but I stood up for myself in this important situation in my life!!

Thank you so much for writing this! It's hard to imagine having to be so brave during such an emotionally hard situation! Especially with a boyfriend like that- sheesh!! You're one tough lady, and I admire you deeply for sharing your experience! I especially appreciate that you were blunt and honest about why you chose abortion, it opens the door for other women to say "it was my choice, I don't need to justify it!". This was an empowering read, thank you again for the reminder of why legal abortion is vital to womens emotional and mental health :)

Thanks for your comments. I know quite a few women who have had abortions who never talk about it. I think we have to be open and stand up for ourselves. It's our own lives we're talking about!

You were one of the lucky ones to survive intact. A few girls that I knew from that time must have waited longer and either died or became sterile.

Thanks for your comment. I do not know anyone else who had an illegal abortion and shared her experience with me. But there must be many around. Or they are already deceased. (I'm 80!) My husband is a physician who was at Bernalillo Hospital in Albuquerque and saw many self induced abortions, many who died. And yes i was lucky the person didn't puncture some of my vital parts!!

Great story and well written, please keep writing about your life and I'll keep reading! I completely agree about safe and legal abortions.... we will always have the need for abortions and countless women have died from unsafe procedures, so they need to be legal! Making abortion illegal won't save babies, it will only put more women at risk.

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