max s. gerber(the latest shot)

when i last saw patty she had just graduated from high school and was headed off to college. the next few years after that brought a scramble of other things to distract me; trying to make a living, trying to find the book a publisher, maybe even trying to grow up a bit. when the dust cleared, i realized i had lost track of patty. her old number was disconnected. the family had moved. patty’s parents spoke spanish, mostly, so the whole time we were shooting the hearts book all my dealings were with patty directly. unlike the other families, where the parents were the ones who approached me, my first call from the folgar’s came from patty herself.

luckily, finding her didn’t prove to be as difficult as i feared. in fact, we ended up living in the same town, not three miles away from each other. what are the odds? so this morning i saw patty for the first time in three and half years, and i gotta say, just like all the other kids, it sure is great to catch up.

a lot has happened to patty in the intervening time. good things and bad things, just like life. shortly after she started college her mother, estella, passed away. estella had a pacemaker. patty says she died from complications after a stroke, but it’s hard to say what caused it, hard not to point fingers at the heart, sometimes. we always look for an answer to “Why?”, but i’ve come to think it’s not good to be too quick to make assumptions.

patty has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. this means her heart is greatly enlarged and susceptible to dangerous arrhythmias. you know when you hear about high school athletes suddenly dropping dead on the football field, and nobody ever knew anything was wrong with them? that’s hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. anyway, unlike all the other kids in the book patty’s condition is genetic, not congenital. her parents have it too. she had a brother and a sister who both died at the age of ten. same condition.

patty has an implanted defibrillator. if her heart starts beating way too fast (as it’s prone to do) the defibrillator goes off and shocks her back into a normal rhythm. unfortunately this hurts. patty says it feels like getting kicked in the back, and you never know when it’s going to happen, either. she said a couple years ago she had a faulty lead wire, and the defibrillator would go off arbitrarily almost every day, usually when she was asleep. that’s a rude awakening. eventually she had to go in to the hospital to get the lead replaced. this after the defib went off twenty times in two hours. imagine getting powerful and painful electric shocks every six minutes.

oh, and the good news: patty’s engaged! crazy to think of it. patty’s engaged, jeni’s married. . . i feel so old. also, she’ll be graduating from college in may, as a communications major. she offered to help me with media training so i don’t make a fool out of myself if i ever end up on TV for anything. in other good news, there were orange trees in her backyard. i got a big bag of oranges to take home, and as a result i’m currently braising short ribs for ethan in orange juice and hot peppers. thanks, patty.

here’s patty and her mother, estella, in 2002: