Spartan Profiles: Athena Trentin
MONSTER HOUSE CREW
In June, the Discovery Channel’s Monster House featured its first all-female crew. Five women builders successfully converted a desert home in suburban Los Angeles into a surfer’s paradise. One star was Athena Trentin, ’96, M.A. ’00, an international student advisor at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and a licensed master plumber (a skill she learned while working at MSU’s Physical Plant).
In the episode, she was seen crawling under the house to install water and drain lines while fending off spiders and other effluvia. “I didn't look like my normal gorgeous self,” says Trentin with a hearty laugh. “When I came out of hibernation, I looked pretty disgusting!” Nonetheless, Athena, a native of Escanaba and member of the Little Traverse Band of Odawa Indians, ranks it as one of her top accomplishments—especially having just recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. “We had to haul 7,000 pounds of concrete,” she notes. “I had no idea if I was going to get a relapse.”
When first diagnosed with CFS in 1999, she recalls, “I couldn’t move, my body felt 10 times heavier, the lymph nodes under my arms were so swollen I couldn’t turn around in my car to reach the buckles, and I had a constant sore throat.” The doctors only knew it was an immune disorder and were not able to help. So she took matters into her own hands. She discovered that yoga helped. “One reason I believe I got sick is that I had so many goals I just kept going and going and ignored signs from my body,” she explains. The other thing that helped were herbal medicines, such as cat’s claw.
After finishing her MSU master’s degree, in 2000 she felt strong enough to move to southern California (in late 2001). The Monster House gig was a calculated risk, but it has paid off. “Today we’re the best of friends,” she says of her crew. Next up for Athena: Completing her doctoral degree in international education from the University of Southern California in 2006.