lifeonq.com

Ode to Onge

Andrea Capozzi, a 39-year-old Atlanta resident, Life University graduate and a successful Midtown chiropractor, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. On Tuesday, February 26, doctors told Andrea’s family that she had less than seven days to live. As of this writing, she is still alive, almost seven weeks later. She is living in a hospice facility back home in New Jersey, when her father moved her after the doctors at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital had diagnosed the Ovarian cancer that had spread to her brain. Her tenacity is surely testament to her focus on health. A benefit has been scheduled for next Sunday, April 20 from 1 until 8 p.m. at Calavino’s in Decatur to raise money for medical expenses. Ironically, but not surprisingly in this country’s woefully inadequate healthcare system, Andrea is a healthcare professional with no health insurance.

When I first visited Loving Hands Family Chiropractic, Andrea Capozzi had just completed chiropractic school. She took x-rays, evaluated the black-and-white view of my aching back, and explained chiropractic care to me in an attentive, engaged manner that I have rarely encountered with healthcare professionals. Endless repetition can make such orientations more often rote than not. But not with Andrea, known affectionately as Onge. I had never been to a chiropractor before. My first impression of one was in the form of a young, beautiful, fellow lesbian with tremendous charisma, an ever-present smile and a genuine enthusiasm for her profession. Now well more than a decade later, I sit here wondering what I can say that would not seem a cliche. What can you say when someone you’ve known for the majority of your adult life, someone who is younger than you, someone who provided care to you, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer?

When I first met Onge all those years ago, she was literally fresh out of school. She did not personally adjust me until some time later, after she had received her license following exams. My first adjustments were from her then partner, Natalie Topeka, an equally charismatic woman of great wit and what sometimes seems a miraculous talent for her work. After the license to practice arrived, I was adjusted by whichever partner was available when I showed up. For the first couple of years, I went to Loving Hands twice almost every week. I wasn’t in particularly poor health. Most of my visits were for wellness care, or for relief from a cold. I did have off-and-on back pain, mostly because I have never understood that gravity applies to me. The truth is many of my visits were as much about seeing Natalie and Onge as about the adjustments. I became, and still am, a true believer in chiropractic care. But I wonder if Andrea’s ever-present smile and the warm hug that came after every adjustment were as healing as any of the twists and turns of my spine. Natalie’s pranks at Halloween and playful Easter-egg hunts also had entertainment value.

These brief encounters continued for years. I never became close personal friends with either Andrea or Natalie. We met for pizza a time or two. They came to a pool party at my old place in Stone Mountain. I played on the Loving Hands softball team the summer my father was dying in 1996. I was an emotional rollercoaster during my father’s struggle with cancer, and not always pleasant to be around on the Softball Country Club fields, but those games were a welcome relief, a moment of play, in an otherwise deadly serious time of my life.

I eventually stopped going to Loving Hands Chiropractic about a year after Natalie and Andrea ended their partnership and Natalie left the practice. I was healthy and was traveling a lot with my work, so I had cut my chiropractic visits back to every couple or three weeks in my last years as a patient there. I ran into Onge regularly at clubs and events around town after that, and always got that bright smile and warm hug. My last conversation with her was shortly after she closed the Loving Hands office on Lavista Road and moved her practice to Midtown.

When I heard the news of Andrea’s cancer in mid-March, I was profoundly shocked and saddened. My perspective, as a casual friend and former patient, surely pales in comparison to the shock and sadness and grief being endured by her family, her close friends, and her partner–who is now separated from Onge by her duties with the U.S. Navy. Thanks to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Onge does not have her partner by her side.  LGBT servicemembers do not have the option to request hardship leave to be with a dying partner.  But that is more pain and frustration than I can write about in one sitting.

I have been shaken by the news of Andrea’s illness. I’ve said prayers, lit a candle, directed energy toward New Jersey. I have felt a little strange, too, that I have had such a profound reaction to the illness of one of my doctors, only a very casual friend. Then, a very good friend suggested to me that because Onge was my caregiver, my healer, there is naturally a part of her that is connected with me. I guess the care that Onge is giving now is the knowledge that all of our encounters with others in this life have meaning. Our care for others, our compassion for their pain and struggles, our work to improve their condition–whether that condition is physical, emotional or spiritual–has a profound and lasting effect on their lives. Onge’s life and work have enriched my life. I wish I knew of some way to give back to her now.