Читать книгу Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women онлайн

16 страница из 82

“Howard and I did get married. And when I became pregnant, they told me: either an abortion or heart surgery. Already at the age of 13 I had heard that I could die because of my heart or my lungs. Therefore I thought that I could die in either case, by giving birth or by having the surgery. I chose what was good for me. I had nothing to lose. Imagine this! And now an old woman is sitting across from you. It is really strange how things happen in life.”

Ellen Carney was told that she was the first pregnant woman in America who underwent heart surgery. “I was seen as a special case in the University Hospital in Philadelphia and I became a media star overnight.” The surgery was successful, but asthma and coughing have been her steady companions until today. “My lungs could not recover; they were too heavily damaged.”

In their utopian community of intellectual leftists Ellen blossomed. “We were different from the average Americans, and I appreciated it. We were looking for a different path, an interior rather than an exterior one, watched each others’ children and functioned as nurses for each other. We were almost self-sufficient, created our own little world.