Stories About Mark

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John's Story

I have been the Manager of a sober house for the past seven years. A sober house is the last step for an addict in recovery, after detox, a treatment center, and then a half-way house. A sober house is a place where addicts in recovery can stay and get their heads together while they figure out how to live a sober life. It's not a medical facility at all, it's a residence, where we enforce sobriety through testing.

"Let's go for a walk"

Submitted by John Curtis May 2018

It was spring. March, April. I don't remember which -- and that was a big part of the problem, that I couldn't remember. But I do remember it was a warm afternoon and spring was coming on. Mark sought me out, and asked me to go for a walk. Mark wanted to talk to me, that I do remember.

A few weeks earlier in January I'd had a seizure. I had never had one before, or at least I don't ever remember having one. I remember waking up that day in January in the Emergency Room at Lowell General Hospital, with my sister and about a dozen medical people around me in one of those cramped little ER bays with a curtain across the front.

"What did you take?" the doctor asked me, flashing a penlight into my eyes.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"What drugs are you on?" he looked at me intently.

"I'm not on anything," I told him. They all looked at each other, the skepticism plain on their faces.

Somebody from a sober house has a seizure. And he says he's not on anything. Uh-huh.

So the doctors put me on Dilantin and patted me on the back and sent me on my way out into the cold January evening.   Oh, and they gave me a nice pamphlet about the dangers of illicit drug use on the way out of the Emergency Room, too.

And now it was a few weeks later, and Mark said he wanted to take a walk to the park. "Going for a walk" was almost a joke in the house. If somebody in the house said they wanted to take a walk with you, it meant that they wanted to get away from the house with its paper-thin walls, and people nosily listening in to every conversation.

Mark and I walked the couple of blocks to the South Common, and sat on the hill overlooking the running track and soccer field in the weak spring sunshine.   I didn't say anything as Mark struggled to string together the words he wanted to say, which was uncommon for him. Mark popped up from sitting on the grass and moved down the hill a step or two and started stretching, as if he was going to take a run around the track.

"Listen..." he began, looking carefully at me. I just looked at him.

"What's wrong with you?" he asked. I hadn't shared anything about my seizure with anyone in the house, of course.

"What do you mean?" I said as the cool breeze in the park picked up.

"Something's wrong with you. You're... off."

"I don't know what you're talking about", I said coldly.

Mark stepped up the hill until he was only a footprint away, and then squatted down in front of me until he could look me right in the eye. "Level with me," he asked.

"I know you're not getting high. That's not it. Something's physically wrong with you. It's like you're not all there or something. And your balance is off. You can barely make it up and down the stairs. You look terrible. Your skin is all pasty and you have dark circles under your eyes."

"Nothing's wrong with me," I lied to him. But as sharp as Mark was, he knew I was lying.

"You don't have to tell me what's wrong," he told me, "but I think you need to get to a doctor, right away."

So we walked back to the house, but I took Mark's advice and I called up my neurologist for an appointment. I discovered that I had somehow blown off a couple of follow-up appointments over the previous weeks, so they wanted me in the next day.

My sister drove me to the appointment. I remember I didn't feel well at the doctor's office, but I ascribed it to nerves. I remember asking where the men's room was at the doctor's office, but that's the last thing I remember.

Until I woke up at Lowell General Hospital. Yup. Again.

This time I was all by myself in a hospital room instead of the Emergency Room, and it was nighttime. Did I have another seizure? I called for the nurse, who was delighted to see me awake, but wouldn't tell me anything, but told me she would page the doctor. My throat was sore and I seemed to have a lot of tubes and wires attached to me at various points, which I took as a bad sign.

There was a bedside telephone so I called my sister at home.

"You collapsed in the doctor's office," she told me. The Dilantin you were prescribed had turned toxic and you were probably hours away from death." I was stunned. "If you hadn't been in a doctor's office, a doctor who knew what Dilantin toxicity looked like, you'd be dead now," she told me. "You were on a respirator and dialysis for the past couple of days."

I was in the hospital for another five days. When I got out of the hospital and went back to the house, most of the residents acted like they hadn't even noticed I'd been gone. And maybe they hadn't even noticed. One of the things about a lot of addicts is that they get wrapped up their own drama and nothing much else seems to matter to them.

Mark knocked on my door that afternoon I came back. "Do you want to go for a walk?" he asked through the closed door. I opened my door, and Mark was standing there with a smile on his face. "If you don't really want to talk about it, that's okay. I just want to know if you're all right."

Dilantin is the oldest anti-seizure drug there is, more than a century old at this point. It can shut down about half of the activity in your brain, and it can make you sleep eighteen out of twenty-four hours a day. They give Dilantin to people who come into the Emergency Room with seizures when they don't know what's causing the problem, because that drug works whether the seizures are caused by a brain injury, medication, withdrawal, or any other cause.

But Dilantin is essentially coal tar, and it can build up in your body until it kills you. You can't take Dilantin for more than a short time without serious problems. And did I just mention that Dilantin halves your mental capacity? I had follow-up appointments at the doctor's that I slept through, calls from the neurologist's office in my voicemail that I never noticed. And if anybody asked me how I was feeling I just said I was okay, of course.

If Mark hadn't taken me aside, I wouldn't be here.

Maybe you know all of this already. Of course I told him what was going on. We walked to the park that day I came back from the hospital and I told him all about the seizure and the Dilantin. "I wish you'd told me up front," he told me. "I know a lot about meds, and I could've told you to get on your doctor's ass about getting you off Dilantin right away." Mark stared off across the barely-greening park under the blue afternoon sky.

Maybe, but I'm fine now," I told him, though even the two-block walk to the park had been a struggle.

"No you're not," he told me matter-of-factly. "You're not 100%." I didn't like hearing that, and he knew it. But we had reached a point in our sober-house relationship where Mark wanted trust from me, and that had to go both ways.

"Aha." Now you begin to understand. It was never Mark's smile. It was never his dimples. It was never his muscles.   It was that Mark gave a damn at moment when I needed somebody to give a damn.   Mark never made a big deal about it ever again. But that's when I began to trust him.

For most people, the two halves of their brain are a mirror image, but the two halves of my brain aren't mirror images. And that's a very complicated thing, because one half of my brain has lesions that look a lot like Multiple Sclerosis, but the other side doesn't have any lesions, so I don't have Multiple Sclerosis. But I do have a team of doctors at Brigham & Women’s in Boston, a neurologist here in Lowell, and the Dean of Harvard Medical School had me do a presentation pointing out the lesions on the MRI brain slides of a patient who should be dead but wasn't, then the Dean revealed to the auditorium that I was in fact that patient.

I'm here because your Mark kicked me in the shins and told me to go see a doctor.

And Mark wouldn't let me get into a funk when the doctors started talking about degenerative brain diseases, dementia, paralysis and all the rest of the horrible stuff I might have to look forward to someday. Mark would see me come home from the latest poke-and-prod, the latest MRI, or see another white paper bracelet on my wrist.

"Sure," Mark would say. "It all might happen, all of the bad stuff. But it hasn't happened yet, so how about you get on with your life in the meantime?"

I don't do a "What-would-Mark-do" thing, but I do have moments when I give somebody another chance because some small part of me still hears the echo of Mark's voice here in the house.   And I think the echo of his voice says not to give up. To never give up. Even when I fail, even when I fall, to pick myself up and try it again.

It was a gift to have known him.

Mark wanted to know if the house was a sober house because he had heard that there was a "serious" zero tolerance sober house on this street. I told him that we were indeed a sober house, but we didn't do walk-ins. He asked me if he could come in to call his parents, to see if they could get the referrals he needed. I said yes, but let him in only as far as the front hall. He called his mother, who then called his doctor, and Mark got the requisite documentation and funding to get into the house.

And then Mark crapped out spectacularly a few weeks later. Click here to read more

By John Curtis

November is the month that Mark is most with me.

There are other times of the year when I think of him, of course. I think of him on those first really hot days of the summer that were always his favorite time of the year, and he would blossom with happiness like the summer flowers. And his birthday in December is a day I just want to be alone, and I brood on the unfairness of the universe taking him so soon.

And I remember I used to think of May as the sweetest month of spring, but now it seems like a black hole on my calendar.

There are different special "Mark" days for you of course, and the holidays will always be difficult. And you think of him every day, don't you?

He came to our door in November, you'll remember. It was as cold as winter, blustery and gray, definitely not the weather for Mark. Chris called disapprovingly up to me on the third floor, "There's some guy here who wants to come in".

And maybe it would be a better story to say I liked Mark as soon as I met him, but I didn't. He was miserable and desperate and I don't remember what I was in the middle of but I didn't want to be bothered.

"Is this a sober house?" he asked. "I heard there was a sober house on this street... a REAL sober house..."

I wasn't impressed. "We don't take walk-ups," I told him, looking down on him from the top of the front steps.

"Do I need a referral? I can call my doctor," he stuttered, shivering in the cold. "I can have my mother call my doctor," he said.

Chris, just inside the door, was looking daggers at me, waiting for me to send Mark away.

But I had pity on Mark. "You can come in to make some calls," I told him.

"No, he CAN'T!" Chris insisted.

"He can come into the front hall and I'll watch him while he makes his calls," I told Chris.

"It's all on you," she clucked as she rolled her eyes at me and slammed the first floor apartment door as she retreated.

The cold of the unheated hallway was little better than the sidewalk, and Mark later told him that I intimidated the hell out of him that day, which made me laugh. Me intimidating Mark?

His hands shook as he called you, and I wondered if he was high, detoxing, nervous, or just cold.

And so these cold days of November when the world turns to gray and rust, days that are so unlike the warm summer days he loved so much, are the days when Mark is most with me.

He filled the calendar after that with some better days, and spent a greater part of the following year teaching me how to manage a sober house, and therefore how to be a better person, but it all started on a blustery cold day in November when the wind spoke of a cold winter on its way.

And Mark made his way to our door.

Every year I put aside All Souls Day on the second of November to visit the graves of people I miss. I find as I grow older I have little use for Halloween, but gravitate more and more to the tradition of La Dia De Los Muertos, a day to visit the graves of those dear to you and recall happy memories of their lives, and leave a gift of food.

At Pine Ridge I left a gift of suet cakes for the birds, and remembered Mark at his happiest in the warmer days that followed that gray November afternoon when I first met him.   And I was somehow warmed in the cold of November remembering him in those warmer, happier days.   Those suet cakes are a greasy mess to pull apart. I could hear Mark's wry laughter in my head, “Maybe next year you can go with some dry stale cookies instead?” and I smiled.

I will remember Mark for all the Novembers for all the rest of my years.