November 04, 1997

MARY

Things didn't go as well as I had hoped while I was in San Jose. I arrived in San Jose, CA around September 14th. I had hoped that I'd might get off the bike for the Winter but that didn't happen. It was a really rough time both emotionally and psychologically. It was great seeing my friend Mary again. Mary was the mother of Terry Nail who I had ridden with in the Southeast back in 1993.

I didn't expect to stay with her as long as I did. I had hoped that one of her daughters who was a friend of mine might have helped me try to find a place to stay as we had talked about but things didn't work out. It was sort of hard with my staying at Mary's one bedroom aparment but we managed.

Mary's health was a lot worse than the last time I had seen her. At least, she was making an effort in stopping smoking. I thought I would try and stay on to help her get into some better programs for assistance.

The longer I stayed with Mary the more concerned I got with her health. Nobody had checked to see if any of the medicine that she was taking was negatively reacting any of the twenty or so pills that she was taking. What concerned me the most was that her latest medicine to help her stop smoking was causing her problems that I hadn't seen before.

She was having trouble with her balance and walking. It was a scare when she fell a couple of times. I tried to get her to use a cane but she always forgot. Mary was also having short term memory loss. I was getting more concerned about the new medicine because sometimes she would stop and stare in an unfocused way like she was unwaware of her surroundings.

I was going to move on the first of October. The afternoon before I was planning to leave, Mary went out for a walk with one of her daughters and her granddaughter to a nearby. After about three hours, I was starting to get concerned because Mary had never been out this long and the park was quite a ways away for her to try and walk. With every hundred feet or so she would have to stop and rest.

About four hours after Mary had left the apartment, I got a call from one of the hospital's emergency rooms. Mary had been hit by a car. I had thought that they had driven in a car to get to the park. The park was over a mile away from the apartment building. I was shocked that Mary made the attempt to walk. She had never gone a few blocks away from her apartment. Mary would have had to stop many times along the way to rest.

The last place that Mary stopped to rest was at a covered bus stop across from the park to rest while her daughter and granddaughter went across the street to the playground. After about fifteen minutes, Mary got up and started to walk across the street without checking to see if there was any ongoing traffic. The street corner didn't have the best lighting. A few steps away from the curb Mary got hit by a car. The driver in the car that hit Mary didn't have any time to react.

The emergency room personnel wanted me to tell them over the phone what kinds of medication that Mary was on. I quickly gathered up all of the pill bottles in the house. They were amazed that I went on an on. I must have gave them the information about two dozen medications over the phone. A half hour after the emergency room call, I got a call from my friend Terry Nail telling what had happened. She asked me if I wouldn't mind staying on to watch the apartment and cat. There wasn't anybody else available to do it so I agreed to stay on.

Mary spent two weeks in ICU. She had quite a few internal injuries along with a badly broken arm. There was also the possibility that she would never walk again because there was some spinal cord damage. I only had the chance to visit with her for about ten minutes the following day. I was passed off as a son from her first marriage.

Things were not really improving and they had to insert an air line because one of her lungs had collapsed. Towards the end of the two weeks, Mary went into a coma and there was a possibility that she wouldn't wake up again. A lot of her bodily functions started to cease and her body was being maintained by life support. The family had to make a hard decision on terminating life support.

It was a tense situation for all of us afterwards. I decided to head out about four days before there was going to be a memorial service for Mary. I had stayed in the apartment after Mary's death about four weeks. Before I left, Terry came by the apartment to thank me and give me a little spending money to compensate me for what I had done.

My plan was to head south to San Diego and maybe head across the country again. I wasn't looking forward to it because it gets sort of cold riding through the desert.