Matthew Wilkinson

In my defense, I was drugged out of my mind at the time. So I really can’t be held responsible for… we’ll come back to that. Let’s start at the beginning.

It was August of 2013. I lived in the Mountain Gate neighborhood of Palm Springs, a gated community which locals referred to as Mountain “Gay”-te because of the large number of homosexuals, myself included, who lived there.

I had, more or less, settled in to life as a disabled retiree. I say “settled in,” I mean “resigned myself to” because there was little I could do about the cards fate had dealt me. With me were my three dogs – Dennis (a bossy Corgi mutt), Wil (a happy-go-lucky Chocolate Labrador), and Mandy (a regal, pretentious Vizla). During the day, from 9 in the morning until 6 at night, we were joined by Greg, a private caregiver who worked Monday thru Friday; on weekends it was Dave filling that role.

Earlier that evening, I’d had a hankering for a burrito. Dave (it was a Saturday) knew of a yummy Mexican place that had just opened in town which everyone was raving about, so he went there to get me one. When he brought it back I told him to leave it on a plate with a glass of milk next to me in the living room and that I was good for the night so he could knock off early. He changed me into my pajamas, then hit the town – Arenas Road, where all the gay bars are – and I hit the remote: if memory serves, I was obsessed at the time with the show Criminal Minds about the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit that used the psychology of murderers to catch them. One of the higher – by that I mean in the 200s or 300s – cable channels had back-to-back episodes of the show on weekends, so I munched on my burrito and stared passively at the television screen. The dogs took up their usual positions – Dennis on my lap, Wil laying on my feet, and Mandy, who was always a bit standoffish, on the other side of the room. As we watched the show, it slowly got darker outside.

It started around 8 o’clock, a dull, persistent pain in my lower back above both my hips. Not sharp or shooting, and adjusting my position on the couch didn’t provide any relief, but I didn’t think much of it; I figured the burrito from the new place had been a bit dodgy and that this was indigestion, so I called it a night and went to bed. The dogs took up their usual positions – Dennis lying next to me so that his body was touching mine, Wil probably a foot away taking up half the bed, and Mandy curled up on the floor, a look of disgust on her face for how “needy” her two dog brothers were.

I fell asleep.

I woke up two hours later. The pain was unbearable. It was still sortof just “there” and in my lower back, but it had increased in intensity a hundredfold. I had the presence of mind to conclude that maybe this wasn’t just gas. So I figured I’d better get help.

But how? I had one of those “medic alert” buttons (you know, from the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials), but I didn’t want to push it. When I’d used it in the past, the emergency services always created such a scene: firetrucks, police cars, an ambulance, their flashing lights lighting up my quiet neighborhood like a light show at a Pink Floyd concert. Moreover, since the caregivers always locked all the doors when they left for the day, and I couldn’t just bounce up to let them in, the first responders would end up breaking the front door down. This had happened before, and I’d already replaced my front door three or four times. So I reached for my cell on the nightstand and called Dave.

It’s a good thing cells these days have caller id, because I could not form sentences. That’s not true – I could form them, but I could not speak them; all that was coming out of me were groans and coughing. Dave, for his part, had been out drinking since I let him off earlier that night around 5, but when he saw my name on his cell and heard that I was in some kind of distress, he got someone he was with who was more sober to drive him over to my house.

That alone saved my life.

Dave and his friend took one look at me and called 911. We still ended up with a late night light show in the neighborhood, but my front door was spared because Dave was there to let them in. I was rushed off to the ER, and then into a pulmonary ICU. The ER doctors determined I had blood clots in both my lungs, called emboli. The clots had likely started as a single clot in my inactive and non-functional left leg and then broke in two and lodged in my lungs. A blood clot that travels to the heart is a heart attack, one that travels to the brain is a stroke, and to a lung is an embolism. Bottom line, I could not breathe, and spent the next fifteen days on supplemental oxygen while they used various drugs administered intravenously to break up the clots. I was in and out of consciousness.

When I came around, it was September. I had been moved to a regular hospital room, and, ironically, my nurse was named Dennis. I remember thinking he was rather handsome. As he officiously tapped away at his computer and adjusted things like an IV drip and vitals monitor, he told me what the last couple of weeks had been like for me because I had no recollection of anything after the burrito and calling Dave. Apparently, I had punched a nurse in the jaw in the ICU who had been trying to adjust an oxygen mask over my mouth.

Then he said, “What’s the fluffy train?”

I told him I didn’t know, because I didn’t, and I don’t. Sat here this morning, I am no closer to discovering what the fluffy train is than I was thirteen years ago. But according to Dennis, I spent my time in the ICU shouting “watch out for the fluffy train.” That, and something about a “French piano” being out of tune.

It was another two weeks for recovery in the hospital then back home with my dogs. Wil and Dennis were ecstatic to see me. Mandy was herself – more reserved, but I could tell she was glad I was home. While I was gone she had torn up and completely destroyed the couch where I used to sit in the living room!

Within a month I had moved to assisted living. The move was a big deal for me. I knew I’d be living with 70- and 80-year-olds; I was 47 at the time. I knew I’d be giving up my independence, something I’d spent my entire adult life trying to achieve then guard. I knew I’d have to find a new home for two of my three dogs, only Dennis was small enough to make the move from a four bedroom house with a yard to a studio apartment. And I knew that this was “it” – if my health remained stable, I’d spend the next 30+ years in assisted living, and, almost certainly, die there when the time came.

It was not an easy decision.

But it was the right one. Living alone, when you require the kind of help I do just to make it through the day and perform simple tasks like getting dressed or taking a shower, is dangerous. I’d convinced myself that having someone around during the day was enough. But of course this life-threatening emergency happened at night. As have all of my life-threatening emergencies. With one exception (about two years ago), all of my ambulance rides have been at night. Aside from the assistance with my activities of daily living (ADLs), I am comforted by the knowledge that help is available 24/7 just down the hall, or in our case at Stonewall – across the courtyard.

Thirteen years on this month, eleven of them at Stonewall Gardens, I don’t regret and have come to like the choice I made to live out my days in assisted living. But I do have one regret: never figuring out what the hell the fluffy train is.