heroines who made a difference
DALE FOSS
First Love
I first felt the energy of love at age 9 when Dale, an upstairs neighbor that I’d only known for a short time, rocked and held me in her arms and murmured again and again that she loved me and that she was sorry she was moving away and couldn't take me with her.
In those moments LOVE as a reason to BE, to LIVE, came fully alive in me as a living energy, as essential as the air we breathe. She also told me that I had to learn to take better care of myself and reach out to others because my mother was too sick and didn't have the capacity to love or care for me.
Dale’s words created a longing and life purpose to learn how to receive and give love. To become an expression of LOVE itself in the form of Presence.
DIANE WALTERS
Queen for a Day
Dale's love created a hunger. I reached out and played a game of "Queen for a Day." modeled after the popular TV show. I crowned Diane as my very own, Queen in the middle of the drug store where she worked. For the next year, she helped me on her supper break with my homework.
SISTER SEBASTIAN
Gentle and Fierce Compassionate Presence
The nurses at the hospital I was candy-striper in called her a “fierce old broad” who’d been a WAC (Women’s Army Corps) during World War II. I observed her gentle as an angel as she held new born infants in her arms on the delivery floor that she managed. She did the sex education lecture that 5th and 6th graders had to attend. As I listened to her talk about sex as a holy act because of the bonds of love, I knew I needed to know her. I realized that the only kind of sex I knew about sure had no holiness attached to it.
Overtime, Sister Sebastian mentored me and helped me hold my soul together through talks over tea and walks in the nun’s meditation garden. Eventually, she helped me decide to try to stay alive despite every reason I believed that there was no reason to. Her fierce surety and belief in me made a difference.
DR. SYDNEY KRAMPITZ, PH. D.
Warrior-Willing to Risk Her Career For Me
The day I came back to ISPI hospital from being court-ordered to a state hospital for non-compliance around taking the unnecessary and debilitating drugs they were giving me, Sydney, the evening nurse, checked on me throughout her shift. After she was off, she sat with me through the long dark night, insistent that I let myself feel something about the direction my life was now headed.
She vowed to stay until morning and told me I would never survive if I didn’t let myself feel something. About dawn, my feelings broke open like a dam. Sydney told me she would do everything she could to get me out, that my commitment was wrong, and that it was likely illegal. I wanted to believe her but I didn’t.
Over the next fifteen months, Sydney risked her own career to get me out of Elgin State Hospital. It was almost too late. I later learned from her that ISPI had been doing drug research, which is why they had been giving me so many drugs. I was moved because I was considered a failure as a research subject with my attempts to refuse the drugs. They would no longer tolerate that because it was skewing their research results - so - with no one in my life to support me - I was court ordered, committed - to Elgin State Hospital for the mentally insane.
And There was a Hero,
Dr. Calahan
Dr. Callahan, the medical director of Lake County Hospital was a quiet, thoughtful man. He saved my life at the end of my senior year when yet another foster home had fallen apart. He promised if I brought him my high school diploma, he’d give me a job as a nursing assistant and let me live rent- free in a small cottage out back of the hospital. The day I graduated, I walked into the nursing station, and to my complete surprise, it was filled with a banner, balloons and a cake that read Congratulations to Our High School Graduate. No one had come to my graduation so I still tear up to this day when I think of that unexpected moment.