My robot care givers – monitors that check out how I was doing at any moment. In the cover photo, those are 1 pound weights on my walker that I struggled with lifting. I wondered what I was going to do with my grandfather’s bamboo cane – use it of course. The rubber bands were for physical therapy.
Five years ago in February I returned home from the hospital and rehab after six weeks on my deathbed, losing 30 pounds (20 percent of my body weight), and surviving two major surgeries within a week.
I’m glad that a visit from the “Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come” is behind me. It gave me a view of what the end of my life might be like and I wasn’t that thrilled with what I saw.
My name’s Alan and I’m an introvert. INFP to be exact, if you’re into the Myers Briggs Type Indicators. Like most introverts, I work pretty well on my own and bring in collaborators as the needs arise and not accustomed to asking for help.
That changed in 2014 when I found myself totally helpless. First, some back story.
I blindly moved into a cohousing community in 2009. That move helped save my life. At first, I didn’t realize it was a haven for introverts.
There aren’t a lot of data about this, but at least one study found that 65 percent of people who live in cohousing communities are inward-lookers or introverts. I tend not to be a “joiner” and happy entertaining myself. Even though it was short term, losing mobility and being home bound is lonely and isolating. That, I hadn’t experienced. I have since learned that loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
When I moved into a senior cohousing community, I didn’t really know what that was about until I was unable to take care of myself, not to mention tending to my business interests. I knew I was aging, but didn’t think it would happen this fast!
In the cohousing community, we all own our own homes, and have agreed to be supportive of one another as good neighbors and chipping in on chores around the complex. Not that I realized it at the time, but cohousing is the perfect living arrangement for introverts where we can have as much community or as much privacy as we want.
When I was in the hospital, I couldn’t walk and could barely lift my arms. I was fed gunk through a tube that flowed directly into my heart. I was left for dead until a laboratory at the University of Michigan figured out that I had an odd ball interstitial lung disease.
Go Wolverines!
This fungal pneumonia, was easily treatable with run-of-the-mill sulfa drugs. It’s the type of pneumonia AIDS patients and over-worked people like me get when the immune system gets beat to crap.
I make movies and have always been able to take care of all my projects, except those that were due in January 2014. The last thing I thought I wanted was a lot of people knowing that I was flat on my back and unable to finish what I had committed to do.
That winter, I was contracted to travel around Wyoming and make tribute videos for the Wyoming Governor’s Art Award recipients. I liked the gig because it got me on the road and a chance to meet some interesting people. A friend and colleague, Michael, stepped up to finish the job that entailed driving around the eighth largest state in the dead of winter.
There was a huge final report due for a state of Wyoming film incentive grant applied to a movie project I coproduced over the summer of 2013. Another friend and colleague, Barbara, finished counting all those beans for me.
I now come up with a “Plan B” for short term projects like those.
Michael, Barbara and I collaborated on a short movie a few years back and I asked them to disassemble my movie production business if I get too out of it.
By the way, has anyone seen my keys?
I still have to find someone to handle my baseball card collection.
When I returned home from rehab the day before Super Bowl XLVIII the community was very welcoming. I wheel-chaired myself to the common house for the Super Bowl party, but had to leave at halftime since my digestive system wasn’t quite ready for nachos. My septic ulcer repair wasn’t totally healed up.
For Broncos fans, it wasn’t much of a game, anyway, 43-8 Seattle.
I intellectually understood the “what” of cohousing, but didn’t get the “why” of cohousing until I was nearly dead.
Asking for help for the good of the whole is a constant in cohousing. My fellow introvert neighbors brought over food, made welfare checks to be sure I was okay. It was a very good feeling knowing there were people around.
In the outside world, people ask, to be polite, “Let me know if I can help.” In the cohousing world people ask, “What can I do to help you NOW?” being intentional about it. At my place, for example, I joined a list of people who will contact caregivers, drive a neighbor to the doctor or hospital, at any moment. I look at it as paying it forward, “You need a jump? I have cables.”
While I wouldn’t trade my stint in the ICU for anything, what I learned about myself was life changing, but I don’t recommend it as the best way to lose weight.
