Some Old Photos

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Disneyland in the 1950;s

Pacific Ocean Park

Our  neighborhood on Third Ave.

coming soon

Griffith Park

Children's Orthopedic Center

April 15 Ain't Just for Taxes Anymore

Two years ago on April 15 2014 I had a terrible headache.  It was not like any other headache  I had ever had.  I was resting on the couch ad actually did go back o sleep.  When I got up to go to the bathroom the telephone rang.  I went to answer it, and that's the last thing I can remember.

Jim remembers it from there on.  I did not answer and he left a message.  When after about 15-30 minutes he called again and left another message.  When I did not call back he realized something must be wrong. Unlike most couples we are very close and are never disconnected from each other, so he told his boss Julie he had to come home to see what was wrong, and she just saint, "Go!"

He got home in record time, then looked around the living room.  He was about to go upstairs to find me when he noticed MacDhui was on the table and Mr. Hata on the floor by it, also looking in the same basic direction.  That is when  he saw me.  I was sitting against the wall on a Rubber Maid container.  He tried to communicate with me, but I was out of it.  He immediately called 911 and go t paramedics on the way.

Almost a month later I came home on May 26.  I had been in the hospital, Evergreen to be precise, for a month.

I had had a stroke, the hemorrhagic variety.  There was no certain reason for the stroke, my blood pressure had been high, but just the Friday before I had had it read and it was fine.  If I had to guess it would be that it was my being on testosterone for my gender transition that may have caused the stroke.  That is, after all, what the class action lawsuit has been about with men who want a return of their virility.

Jim told me that Mr. Duck was so enamored of the paramedics that Jim had to put him in the garage, and he was pissed!  The men asked me and Jim some questions.. I was starting to fall to sleep, but they kept me awake.  The checked my blood sugar and it was fine.  It wasn't until I was in the hospital and had an MRI they knew I had had a srke
.  As I said it was a hemorrhagic stoke and affected my caudate nucleus.  I had to have surgery to allow a stint to be put in to drain the brain fluid.

For Jim that began two weeks minimum of anguishing fear.  He had to watch me sedated and in bed, hooked up to oxygen and various other monitors. on paralytic drugs and not all that sure who I was, where I was ad who he was.  I told the paramedics at home that Jim's name was "Sheriff John", a TV personality from my earliest years in La Puente.

Jim spent the time I was unconscious mostly at the hospital.  He would go home long enough to feed cats and scoop their litter box and to d some laundry and sleep a little.  The rest of the time he was at the hospital with me.  They had me on the paralytic to keep me still and unconscious, unable to pull at my tubes or the ties to the hospital bed.    He would do what he could to help me... He rubbed ice into my scalp under the bandage because it itched s badly.

He told me he read to me while I was barely if at all conscious.  He read of all wonderful things AN INVOLUNTARY KING, my first novel.  ht must have been a precious knowledge for me, as it is my sentimental favorite, my earliest set of friends.

I don't know how he stayed sane or sober for that matter.  He didn't know if I was going to die.  He didn't know if when I finally woke up I would be able to speak or understand or reason at all.  I could have been at best incontinent and at worst a vegetable.

I apparently started to wake up once after two weeks they had moved me to the Ambulatory Rehab Unit, after I had spent the first two weeks in the ICU and a couple days at a midrange rehab nt.  I don't remember anything much before the next Friday.  That would have been  about May 2.  The next day Laurel came to see me and I met Tiffany for the first time.  She and I had a grand time discussing my dreams about Julian Assange and some notion I had that one of my nurses was named Marianne and was somehow connected to the French Revolution. 

I had two very memorable dreams while I was still pretty out of it, though conscious.  I dream I was on a merry-go-round in a park listening to Julian Assange, then a dream about wanting to go to a nearby clinic staffed at night by two of the nurses who looked after me.  One of them was Rasi.  I wanted him to let me stay at the clinic so I could seek more drugs, and he was going to have to fill out a lot of paperwork.  I remember I had peed on my night gown.

I will continue this narrative with Jim's help over the ext coupl of days.