Even in my elementary school
years, sitting in a wheelchair, I was always surrounded by friends. During my
high school and college years, more was always better. If you weren’t on a date,
going out meant going out with the guys. It was always an event that started
with the words “We’re all going to….” When I spasmed a muscle in my lower back,
then ignored it for about a week, the guys were all there waiting for me when I
walked out of University Medical Center after three muscle relaxer injections
straight into the misbehaving muscle. They had also been there when the
paramedics picked me up off the dorm room floor. It had taken a while, but they
finally realized that the tears coming out of my eyes we’re not from laughing
at the baudy English Seafarer drinking songs that one of them had dug up at the
college library. It only hurt when I laughed, literally. About an hour or
so after being wheeled into the hospital, I was back on my feet, and we went
from U-M-C to P-A-R-T-Y!
But at a certain point in my
life, I began to believe that it was better to have quality rather than
quantity, when it came to friends. I guess the way you look at relationships
changes with age. For me, it happened after moving to Los Angeles. I no longer
lived in the friend incubator of the dorm. Although I made many friends, they
all had different personalities, likes, and dislikes. Looking back, my college
buddies were also distinctly different individuals. But there was no longer the
common bond of college life. “Go Cats!” was not a universally understood greeting,
and the Friday night ritual of everyone meeting up at Gentle Ben’s or The Bum
Steer had become nothing more than a distant memory. A lifetime of group friendships
were now scattered across the country.
I always tried to make friends
wherever I went. That rule applied even when I attempted a misguided career as
a life insurance salesperson. It wasn’t good insurance, but it was great money.
My career ended when I walked into a home where they needed food, not our
crummy pay forever insurance plan. I couldn’t do the Hard Sell, and still feel
good about myself. Besides, I was never going to compete with the best
salesperson in the agency. She was a beautiful blond who wore silk shirts open
halfway down her chest and sold most of her policies to young men and older men
who thought they were younger men. Go figure. But I did come away from the
experience of having a strong friendship with another salesperson, Ken.
Realizing that I was never
going to be insurance salesperson of the year, I decided to “bear down,” to use
a University of Arizona Wildcat expression, and focus on my writing career. I
made a lot of friends inside and outside of the Entertainment industry. Some
were famous, most were not. It was also a nice balance of male and female. Yes,
it is possible to be friends with a woman without secretly wanting to jump into
bed every time you get together.
I knew a lot of people I
considered friends, but I found that there was a big difference between friends
and acquaintances. Acquaintances are just like friends in that you can go out
and have fun with them. Friends, on the other hand, are people who you trust
implicitly and care deeply about, especially when it’s not so much fun. Still,
There are times when the line between the two can get blurred. In those
moments, a leap of faith or a twist of fate are the only ways to tell the
difference. It took a unique moment in my life for me to realize that one of my
acquaintances was actually a true friend.
All of my surgeries were done
at Orthopedic Hospital in Downtown Los Angeles. It was a high-tech, acute care
facility. Before one of my surgeries, I was informed me that, at some point, I
was going to be moved to a recuperation facility before removing the cast. This
would be done because all I would be doing was waiting for bones to mend. The
board of utilization, a group of doctors that determines the most efficient use
of hospital beds, wouldn’t allow me to just lay around the Hospital in a
holding pattern. I spent the week before surgery searching for an adequate
recuperation facility.
In those days, there was
no such thing as a rehabilitation facility, at least in the current sense of
the word. The best you could do was find a place to be warehoused for a few
weeks. These places had minimal healthcare and almost non-existent amenities.
They almost always looked better from the outside looking in, then from the
inside looking out. After a few days, I found what was considered to be one of
the best facilities in Los Angeles. I rationalized that it was a just a
temporarily less comfortable Means to an end. After all, I was only going to be
in a full leg cast. I’d done that before and I could do it again, or so I
thought. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.
The surgery went according to
plan, that is, until I woke up. I found myself in a cast from my chest to my
groin, with appropriate openings front and back. The cast extended down my
right leg to my foot. I was, for all intents and purposes, a plaster coffee
table. Still, I was in the Starship Enterprise of hospitals and they knew how
to deal with people furniture. They were also skilled in attending to my need
for food and the eventual outcome of that food. They took care of my Personal
hygiene, and most important of all, pain management. Those were the days before
I trained myself to deal with intense pain without turning to prescription or
non-prescription drugs. They had drugs, lots and lots of drugs. In my case, it was
mostly morphine and Demerol. In the days that followed, I was pain free and as
comfortable as I could possibly be. That is, until the day came when they told
me I was about to be beamed down to a mining planet.
I had conveniently forgotten
about being warehoused. I Was on my back and couldn’t really move. I also had
enough morphine in me to stop a charging rhinoceros. That amount of morphine
can play tricks with your mind. In my case, it caused me to go through
something I’d never gone through before nor have I gone through since. I had a
full-blown, breathing into a brown paper bag, panic attack. Under normal
circumstances, I’m the guy who analyzes, evaluates, and, most importantly,
stays calm. I never panic. But these were not normal circumstances, and I
wasn’t exactly in my right mind.
When the nurses realized that
the paper bag wasn’t working and they couldn’t convince me to relax, it was
suggested that I call someone who might be able to calm me down. At that
moment, I couldn’t remember my own phone number. But for some reason, I
remembered Sharon’s phone number. Sharon was an actor in a very popular
detective TV series. Since we lived pretty close to each other, I would
sometimes go over to her house to chat. Those were the days when chatting was something
you did in person. I considered her an acquaintance. That was about to change.
The nurse dialed the number and
handed the phone receiver over to me. It only took Sharon’s assistant,
Stephanie, about ten seconds to realize that this wasn’t the same person she
knew from my visits. Blurting out, “Sharon’s on her way to an important
meeting. She’s just getting in the car. Let me see if I can stop her.”’ She
dropped the phone. A couple of minutes later, Sharon Picked up the dropped
receiver. The anxiety in my voice told her that she wasn’t going to make the
meeting. I heard her tell Stephanie to reschedule. She spent the next hour or
so talking me down.
As the morphine started wearing off and my panic attack subsided, Sharon felt comfortable enough to end our conversation. I no longer felt anxious about being moved. As it turned out, I had reason to be anxious, but that’s for a different podcast episode. In the end, it wasn’t a group of friends who got me through one of the worst periods of my surgery encompassed life. it was one true friend. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
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