Individual Details

Anna was born in a farmhouse southwest of Brooklyn, Iowa. She attended country school until she went to high school in Brooklyn, Iowa, where she graduated in 1932.
She and Wallace were farmers all their married life. She always grew large gardens and did a lot of canning from it. She rendered lard from the meat they butchered, and helped with the animals and farming when she was needed.
Anna did not learn to drive or get a drivers license during her lifetime, and had to rely on others to take her to shop or get groceries. She could drive the car around the farm. She had bad eyes, always wore strong glasses. In 1987 she was diagnosed as having glaucoma in both eyes, eventually also had cataracts removed from both of her eyes. She was able to control the glaucoma with eye drops, lazer surgery once and periodic eye checkups.
While on the farm at Montezuma, she belonged to two neighborhood clubs, the KYN Club and Beulah Club. She missed these clubs once they retired, but later went to a couple of clubs in Brooklyn. One was the CWW Club, which her mother was a 50 year member of. Just a few weeks before they retired, she broke her ankle while walking across the yard. It took some time to get back to walking on it again.
Anna was diagnosed in January 1987 as having a skin cancer on her forehead. It was removed as an outpatient, but the wound would not heal. She had surgery on her head, which healed nicely and her hair grew back. Over the years she was troubled with more skin cancer on her face, a result of being in the sun and not wearing a hat. She also had high blood pressure, was a borderline diabetic (either you have it or you don't is my opinion), and had some heart problems, but was able to control most of them with proper medication.
In the early 1990's she began having troubles with her feet and legs, primarily caused by her diabetes. She would get sores on her feet that would not heal properly, and had to make lots of trips to the doctor, sometimes weekly, to get them to heal. She eventually had toes on her left foot removed and then noticed she was walking crooked on her foot. More examination at Iowa City showed that the bones in her foot had deteriorated, and were breaking. She was fitted with a brace for her leg and special shoes to control the bone breakage and so she could walk better. She never liked the brace, felt embarrassed by it, but the alternative was losing her leg entirely. She felt fortunate to have her leg at all.
Late in the summer of 1997 she was able to rent a retirement apartment in Sunny View Apartments in Montezuma, Iowa, so she moved there to a three room apartment. It meant she didn't have to worry about the large house, yard work, or snow removal at the house in Brooklyn. She liked it there.
The last day of February 1999 Anna suffered a stroke and heart attack, and was in intensive care and not expected to live. She survived the attacks, had a pacemaker inserted in her chest. While recovering, she went into respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital, again not expected to live. She would not be put on any life support and she had a living will stating so. She recovered and was able to return to her home in about 6 weeks after regaining her strength at the Montezuma Nursing and Rehab Center. The stroke had left her with problems with her speech and writing, so she had therapy to help that. She was able to almost fully recover. After that, she always had a bit of trouble saying words she wanted or she would transpose words, but she did really well.
During the year of 2003, Anna began having spells of congestive heart failure. They always seemed to happen at night when she was alone and then she'd have an anxiety attack. She'd call her daughter, Pat, who lived not far away, and Pat would go in and see how she was. Many times it meant a call for the ambulance and then to the hospital. During one of these stays at the hospital, her blood work showed that she had Chronic Lymphomic Lukemia (CLL). The doctors felt that it was very slow progressing and would not be a worry to her. I believe we all felt that her heart would give out long before anything progressed with it. Skin cancer on her nose and forehead continued to plague her, and she had surgery on her nose to remove it. The doctor would "burn" places from her forehead when it returned there time and again. In August of that year, her heart doctor felt that it was time to try a new procedure to make her heart work better. The procedure failed, but he gave her a new pacemaker. She spent 12 days in the hospital, part of it in intensive care after her lung collapsed.
After a very severe attack of congestive heart failure in January of 2004, she decided to go to the Montezuma Nursing and Rehab Center in Montezuma to live. She was never at all happy there, but it seemed to be the right place to be. With the peace of mind of having help immediately and changes in her medications, her heart spells (at least, no anxiety attacks) stopped entirely. Her daughter, Pat, continued to look out for her and take her to her appointments when she needed to go.
During 2004, with her heart not giving her trouble for some time, her white blood count began to rise, the CLL had begun to cause her anguish. She began seeing the oncologist and he kept close account of her white blood count. Fortunately, it did not rise enough to mean that she would have to consider cancer treatments like Chemotherapy. I'm not sure that she would have even considered such treatment. She was tired of constant doctors poking and prodding her.

**A note of interest ... Many times I had noticed in pictures of mom and others that they had such pretty wavy hair. This would have been during the late 1920's and early 1930's. I asked her how they kept their hair like that. She said that they bought and boiled flax seed and applied it to the hair. It served as a stiffener much like mousse or hair spray would now.

Birth	28 Dec 1914	Brooklyn, Poweshiek Co., IA
Graduation	1932	Brooklyn High School, Brooklyn, Poweshiek Co., IA
Marriage	19 Apr 1935	Wallace Lang BRENIMAN
Probate	2005	District Court, Poweshiek County, IA
Death	13 Mar 2005	Grinnell Regional Medical Center, Grinnell, Poweshiek Co., IA
Burial	16 Mar 2005	Brooklyn Memorial Cemetery, Brooklyn, Poweshiek Co., IA
Reference No		P3
Namesake		Anna Francis Hall and Gertrude Close Goreham, her grandmothers

Spouse	Wallace Lang BRENIMAN (1910 - 1988)
Child	Max Edward BRENIMAN (1940 - )
Child	Patricia Ann BRENIMAN (1943 - )
Child	Living

Notes