Cleansed

She came into the world in the usual way on a late spring day in Andover, N.J., the third of her parents' four children. Ten fingers and toes, a healthy, smiling, baby girl who showed no signs of being anyone other than the baby her parents had high hopes for.

Then her older brother got sick. He ran a terrible fever, and when Brown caught it, her parents didn't worry too much about it. Babies get sick. It's how they build immune systems.

But unlike her brother, who got well with no lasting effects, the high fever damaged the delicate electrical system in Kathy Brown's brain and she experienced her first seizure at 6 months of age. It terrified her parents, who had no idea what it was. And because it was snowing — a terrible early blizzard — it was hours before the doctor could come.

The fever left Brown with epilepsy, a neurological condition that from time to time produces brief disturbances in the normal functions of her brain. It's kind of like a power surge in the brain, and during that surge, she sometimes pauses, like a caesura in a dramatic piano composition.

Because she has also had the kind of seizures that cause her body to convulse, it is a condition that she tells acquaintances and coworkers about. That way, if she experiences one in their presence, they won't become frightened.

In a perfect world, people might say, "Oh" and go about their lives or maybe ask her questions about it. But more often than that what happens, she says, is people get afraid or embarrassed or — worse — just avoid her.

"It was hard for everyone to understand me," Brown says today, sitting on the lanai of her North Naples condo, talking about her childhood. Even her mother didn't know what to do.

"She told people I was retarded," Brown says. And just those words were enough to taint the childhood relationships she could have had with her brothers, sisters and anyone else in their tiny town.

"I was the retard of the family," Brown says, softly, stating what many believed to be the sum of her parts, when clearly, they were wrong.

Unconditional love

Kathy Brown is a woman who's easy to find on Wednesday and Friday mornings. Judging from the Mrrrrrrrooow! coming from an interior room at the Humane Society of Collier County, it sounds like she's killing cats.

"It's all right," she coos to the little Siamese-looking cat sitting in the bathtub with the scowling face and droopy ears.

She gives the feline a final rinse and as the suds disappear down the drain the sopping kitty looks up at her, big blue eyes pleading, whiskers drooping.

Brown doesn't take it personally, nor the almost-healed scratch marks on her right arm from a disgruntled kitty she bathed last week. Brown knows the cats hate water, not her, and as she begins rubbing the cat dry with a towel, massaging arms and legs, scratching under the chin, the purring begins: the payoff for volunteering to groom the cats and dogs that pass through the shelter's doors.

The same things happen with the dogs. As she walks into the kennel, two dozen dogs hit their feet, wagging tails and stretching paws up near the latches on the chain link doors, as if they're saying "Me, Me!" She checks the clipboards for each dog, looking for someone who hasn't gotten a bath yet.

She settles on Rusty, a medium-sized pup with long, auburn hair. He wags with his whole body like a giant, furry, red worm with legs. An elderly couple had recently returned him because they said he was too energetic. He's 11 months old and when Brown picks him up he immediately begins licking her face.

He is less enthused when Brown opens the door to her grooming room and sets him down in the tub. She turns on the water, and as she lathers him up, he props his front legs on the tub ledge, looking around as if there might be somebody around who thinks giving a dog a bath is a bad idea and would be happy to return him to dry land. He never barks, just blinks a couple times and sticks his tongue out for a lick at his nose.

Brown figures when the dogs look cleaner they have a better chance of being adopted. "It just seems better for them and people when they seem presentable," she says. Plus, she thinks they feel better when all the dirt and grime is gone.

As Brown rinses the patient dog, the water muddies like the Mississippi. "They just seem so happy when they're clean," Brown says, "but not when they're taking a bath." She laughs.

When she turns the water off, the tail wagging resumes and she turns her head to dodge a shower of water droplets launched from Rusty's back as gives himself a shake.

Like the cat, Rusty loves the towel drying and Brown finishes him with a blow dryer, covering the delicate underside of his ears with her hand to protect the skin from the heat. She pulls out her scissors to give him a little trim around his feet, ears and backside. They're razor sharp and when she accidentally snips her own finger (a hazard of the trade) it's a bad cut, but she doesn't make a sound.

"I'd rather cut me than him," she explains as she grabs a cotton ball to keep the blood from spilling onto his now-beautiful coat, a slightly different shade of red.

At home

"I always loved dogs," Brown says later, sitting on her lanai as her own two dogs lounge by her feet and take turns climbing into her lap. "The look in their eyes. It's just so sweet." she says of dogs in general.

"I get along better with dogs than I do people," she adds, with a small laugh. "They don't yell," she says, thinking about her mom who failed to ever see her as anything more than a disability.

Classical piano music floats through the open sliding glass door. "I'm teaching myself to play," she explains, though she's too shy to illustrate her progress on the electronic keyboard in the living room.

She also taught herself to paint. Just picked up a brush and gave it a go. But she was never able to escape her mother's critical voice. In her 30s, when she was at the height of her painting phase, she showed a couple of her canvases to her mother, thinking, perhaps, her mom would finally see who she was.

"Maybe you'll amount to something, after all," her mother told her in a backhanded compliment, and eventually Brown put the brushes away.

"It's hard when you don't have the confidence and the self-esteem, because I didn't have that growing up," Brown says.

Leaving home helped. After she got her G.E.D., she moved out and began establishing herself on her own.

"It was easier after a while because they got to know me instead of what Mom was telling them." She began to reinvent herself, and spent years working as a printer's apprentice. And later making windchimes out of seashells for a local company

Her mother died years ago, but Brown says she still hears the voice in her head, telling her she's stupid, that she'll never learn. She knows her mom was wrong.

A few years ago she decided she wanted to pursue dog grooming as a career and sent away for a distance learning education. She got a degree and began using the spare room in her condo just for grooming dogs. She even helps out neighbors whose pups need clips.

She says maybe one day she'll work at a dog grooming business, but for now she's happy volunteering at the Humane Society. "I like just being there for the dogs," she says.

Her husband understands. "He thinks it's dynamite. Mostly because I'm getting into something that I like to do. I used to not really care," she says.

Her face lights up talking about her husband, Bob. She recalls meeting him on the first day of her job making seashell chimes.

"I told him I have epilepsy and he said, 'So what?'" she says, her eyes widening as she relives that first conversation. She'd never met a person who'd responded that way.

"That's nice to say, but ... " she trails off as if to say she wanted to make sure he understood.

"You're just like a regular person," he'd told her, and she was stunned.

"I'm used to people being afraid of me," Brown says. "I'm not used to anyone accepting me."

They've been married for 20 years. He's an accountant and has diabetes. In his eyes the numbers add up. "Bob always tells me that I've saved his life," she says. More than once she's had to call an ambulance after her husband went into shock in the middle of the night. Each time, Brown says she just happened to wake up and look over and could tell there was a problem.

Brown is 50 and it's taken her a while to find this peace. On top of epilepsy, only recently was she diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, finally explaining for her why she has always had such a hard time focusing.

"It's like I was on a train, traveling on a train track and I knew that I wanted to get off but I didn't know how to get there," she says. Now, with treatment for the ADD and an implant that minimizes the number and severity of seizures, she can get there.

"Now I'm finally living," she says.