Sue was, of course, an engineer, and she was the kind of engineer who liked to get her hands dirty. I suspect that if she’d been born a guy she’d have spent a lot of time tinkering with her car, but alas, the details of the arcana of cars seems to be part of the hidden book of lore shared by men, and women only rarely catch a glimpse of those pages.
But although her mechanical engineering talents didn’t find their expression in automobile repair, they did have other outlets. When she first had chemotherapy, she was worried about nerve damage to her fingers (‘peripheral neuropathy’) and of course her hair falling out. She did some research and discovered that you could prevent cells from taking up the poisons in the chemotherapy by reducing their blood supply and metabolism - which you could accomplish by keeping them cold. Exactly how cold one needed was a matter of conjecture, but she figured that she could go for ‘as cold as I can stand it’, and put together a contraption to circulate freezing water around her head during infusions. I can’t remember the details, and I think it went through several revisions, but I believe it involved icewater and a helmet. And of course, because she was Sue, she managed to convince the hospital staff to let her bring it in with her, and it actually sort of did work.
And of course there were the various house projects that she would sometimes let me help out with - I remember hanging lights in her kitchen, re-wiring outlets in the wall (that her contractor had installed incorrectly), reframing a particular octagonal window in the hallway (that a different contractor had installed incorrectly… there’s a theme here) and talking through the merits of various forms of ties for connecting beams in walls (double up the beams that are load bearing, and go with Simpson). She never finished the family room, but it would have been glorious - there were something like 8 different outlets on 6 different circuits, with both manual and automatic control. An engineer’s dream.
Comments