Part of the Community

This past year, I learned I’m not alone.

For most of my life, bad relationships, bad health, and bad luck were things that happened to everyone else. I sailed into retirement the same carefree way I’d plowed through life, eating and partying with the reckless abandon of a teenager.

I lived alone in the Westlake co-op, reveling in my independence. Westlake is a bucolic blue-collar town. Being a former white-collar worker, I had little to contribute to conversations about lodge meetings, colicky grandkids, or the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. After living in Westlake for three years, I was starving for someone to talk to about music, books, and current events. I only knew a few of my fellow tenants, figuring I didn't need them if they didn’t need me.

I somehow became entangled with a crunchy granola couple I referred to as the Weebles when their peculiar son sucked me into a conversation about action heroes. Half an hour later, I was still waiting for him to take a breath. The bell-shaped intellectuals were a contrast socially. She spoke in non-stop Mensa-based tongues while he held his. It wasn’t unusual for him to acknowledge my presence with a tentative grunt or pass by silently as if I were invisible.

There were three other apartments in my section of the co-op. One was occupied by an Irish couple in their nineties. The husband’s mind was foggy, and he passed away a year after I met him. His wife, Flora, still drove and was more lucid than a twenty-year-old. Next door to her was Clarissa, a young divorcee with a sports-minded son. Barely five feet tall, she lived with a man who scaled six and a half feet. It was impossible to get both their heads in a picture.

George and his ex-wife, Gracie, lived next door to me. Although they were divorced, and Gracie had a long-time boyfriend, they stayed together because it was economical. My first encounter with Gracie hadn’t gone well. Gracie happened to be leaving the building when my real estate agent and I came to look at my future abode. With all the warmth of the Wicked Witch of the West, she snapped, “Can I help you?” She relented when I told her we might be neighbors, looking at me like I was covered in camel dung.

George, an electrician, worked nights, leaving the apartment around 3:00 p.m. Gracie, a nurse, left at 5:30 a.m., so they seldom saw each other. George was a holy roller – everything related to Jesus, and he often said a prayer for me whenever we met.

***

Mortality kept slapping me in the face when I retired. I attended three funerals of friends younger than me within two months. One day, I came across a photograph of my friends and me from 1984. There were five of us in the photo. Charlie went to sleep the night his Giants beat my beloved Packers and never woke up. His older brother, Ken, followed five years later. The last time I saw him was four months before he passed. Ken was never a fashion plate, but he’d degenerated into a toothless hillbilly. His younger brother found him a week after he’d died. Sauve and debonaire John followed, succumbing to cancer shortly after we’d reconnected on Facebook. And, finally, mile-a-minute-motormouth Calvin was found dead in his easy chair following a heart attack.

I couldn’t dismiss the irony that I was the only one left alive in the photo. Everyone had always joked I’d be the first to go.

I thought I might join my friends in the afterlife when the calendar hit 2024. I felt sluggish and out of breath all of the time. I sweat like I was standing on the sun. This was soon followed by insatiable thirst. Then, everything I ate began to taste like scrap metal, so I lost my appetite. I thought it was a blessing in disguise because that meant I’d lose some weight.

My eyes started began playing tricks on me. Everything was blurry for a few weeks. I was still undaunted until I got in my car one afternoon and hit a curb. Then I drove into another. Finally, I shredded my tire by hitting yet another curb. My sense of spatial judgment was gone.

My life as a slow-motion movie got worse. I felt like I needed a pully to move one foot before the other. A five-minute trip to take out the garbage took twice as long. I didn’t think about it then, but I do almost every day now - I was fortunate that Busy Body Billy came along. He earned the uncomplimentary nickname because he’s lived in the complex for twenty-five years and knows things about people they don’t know about themselves.

Not everyone liked Billy. The tenants felt he was a nosy know-it-all who talked too much and started his sentences with some variation of “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” when that was precisely what he was doing.

***

I was resting on the front steps, trying to gather enough strength to move, when Billy stopped to say hello. He noticed that my complexion was grey, and I was breathing heavily.

“You know I don’t like to tell people what to do,” he began. “But you need to go to the hospital.”

George stopped in his tracks when he saw me. There was no prayer today, only a look of panic.

George boosted my blood pressure by looking at me and saying, “My God, you look really sick.”

The final arbiter was Gavin. He was a kind, hip-looking Asian American teacher with a taciturn wife and a horde of musically inclined daughters. Gavin agreed with Billy and George, adding, “You really shouldn’t ignore the signs. Something’s wrong.”

Billy called for an ambulance before I could raise enough energy to protest.

I asked Billy to go to my apartment and get my phone and wallet. I didn’t bother taking extra clothes or toiletries, thinking I’d only be in the hospital for a few hours.

The EMTs arrived and hauled me away on a gurney like Caesar being hustled out of Rome.

They were a pleasant and concerned trio who discreetly conducted tests on me as they sped me to the hospital.

The only time there was a hint of distress was when one of them said. “Your sugar level is 521.”

I naively asked, “Is that bad?”

“It should be 84. How the heck are you even walking around?”

****

I soon found myself in a situation where the cure felt worse than the disease. One of the reasons I hadn’t been to a doctor in forty years was I thought they experimented with their patients in the hope of finding a solution. My humbling, eight-day stay did nothing to change my opinion. I had three seizures, likely due to the potency of the medicine they were giving me. At one point, all I had to do was lower my eyes and look to my right, and I’d start shaking like a novice electrician sticking a screwdriver in a light socket. Opening my eyes to find a cluster of wide-eyed physicians standing around my bed whispering, “He’s coming out of the blackout,” didn’t help, especially the second time when I found myself naked with a male nurse molesting me as he jammed a catheter into my most private part. I told him the next time he did something like that, he’d have to buy me a ring.

I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and jabbed with a needle every four hours to test my sugar. I felt like a prisoner being tortured whenever a nurse shook me awake at four in the morning to stab at veins that collapsed days ago.

They tried to give me an M.R.I. every time they were about to release me. I’d have a seizure, and I’d find myself in bed again. It's hard to believe, but there were worse things than the seizures. I wear contacts, and they’re not for sleeping in. After two nights of sitting up and passing out for twenty minutes or so, I asked for some saline solution so I could remove them and actually get some sleep. I successfully removed one but, of course, lost the other. So now I could only see out of one eye.

It was cold enough in my room to solidify anti-freeze. The bed and the sheets were designed for a munchkin, and, of course, I’m one of those fussy sleepers who can only sleep when his sheets are tucked in and his feet aren’t flapping in the breeze like flippers.

***

If you think you can keep your dignity in a hospital, think again. The first indignity is getting fitted for a thin cloth robe with no back. You walk around with your gluteus maximus hanging out – provided you’re even allowed to walk. I wasn’t. I was told I shouldn’t walk to the bathroom because I was at risk of falling. “The hell I am,” I thought. So, I got out of bed, went to the bathroom alone, and fell. Fortunately, there was no nurse around to say I told you so.

Whether I was enduring another needle, recovering from a seizure, or trying to pad my way to the bathroom, I thought I was on my own. Well, not entirely. Helplessness, fear, and loneliness were my companions.

Then Billy called. He’d contacted nearly every floor to find me.

“So, when are you gettin’ out?” he asked.

“I could be here for eternity.”

“Well, let me know when they release you. I’ll come and pick you up.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I replied. “You’ve already done enough. You saved my life.”

“You’re part of the Westlake community. We take care of each other. I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

A twist of fate lifted my loneliness. A few days before I was discharged, I was waiting for yet another test when I gazed across the waiting room. Laying on a gurney, grimacing, was Clarissa’s son, who was about to lose his appendix. Clarissa soon appeared, shocked but pleased to see me.

***

Billy called every day to check up on me and to tell me that the rest of the complex was pulling for me.

Whether my motivation was shame, pride, or embarrassment, I didn’t call Billy when I was released, relying on a cab to get me home. The first driver couldn’t find me and quickly abandoned the assignment. I had to limp the length of the hospital’s taxi stand twice to find the second cabby. The ride home was a fifty-dollar lesson in inconvenience.

***

The doorbell rang soon after I’d settled back in my apartment. To my surprise, it was Gracie checking up on me. She’d kept my packages and mail for me. Utilizing her skills as a nurse, Gracie walked me through setting up my test meter and drawing blood without too much pain. She explained the dos and don’ts of a Type 2 Diabetes diet, made up a grocery list, and went shopping for me. The woman I’d perceived as the Wicked Witch of the West was, in fact, Glinda the Good Witch.

Billy offered to chauffer me around to my doctor’s appointments. Gavin gave me his phone number and pledged his help 24/7. I could tell by his look of concern that he meant it.

***

Now, I don’t mind those baffling conversations with the Weebles. Flora and I often sit together in the sun, and she tells me about her childhood in Ireland. Gavin and I laugh about how cool we were as kids and how domesticated we are now. Billy and I have long conversations about nothing in particular, but we always walk away laughing.

My illness taught me that I wasn’t alone. Somebody cared. In fact, more people cared about me than I thought.