When he receives a call from the vet, writer Matthew Dicks is startled to learn that his dog is in surgery -- and that he agreed to it the night before.
Matthew Dicks is an elementary school teacher and the internationally bestselling author of the novels Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, Something Missing, Unexpectedly, Milo, and The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs. As a storyteller, he is a 34-time Moth StorySLAM champion and four time GrandSLAM champion. Matt is also the founder and Creative Director of Speak Up, a Hartford-based storytelling organization that recently launched the Speak Up Storytelling podcast, which Matt hosts with his wife, Elysha. He recently published a guide to storytelling, Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. Matt loves ice cream cake, playing golf poorly, tickling his children, staring at his wife, and not sleeping.
This story originally aired on July 20, 2018 in an episode titled “Surprises: Stories about the unexpected”.
Story Transcript
The phone rings. I’m standing in my classroom. It’s early morning. I’m getting ready for my fifth grade students. I go and I pick it up.
The woman on the other end identifies herself as the receptionist at the veterinary hospital. She tells me she has news about my dog. It’s good news. She survived the first surgery. I stop her right there and I say, “No, you have the wrong owner. My dog is at the hospital but just for constipation. Like there's no surgery involved. You've mixed something up.”
The woman apologizes and says, “Can you just hold for a minute,” and she clicks off.
As I’m waiting for her to come back I’m thinking about how awful this must be for someone that they're waiting for their dog to live or die through surgery. My dog is named Kaleigh. She's a four-year-old Lhasa Apso. She's a tiny little white thing that lives in my heart. She is my best friend in the world and I can’t imagine how terrible it would be to be waiting for this phone call that someone in the world is waiting for right now.
When the woman clicks back she says, “Your name is Matthew Dicks, right?” And I say, “Yes.” And she says, “Your dog is Kaleigh, right?” And I say, “Yes.”
And she says, “Mr. Dicks, your dog just went through spinal surgery and she's getting ready to go through her second surgery.”
Now, I’m annoyed. I don't mind that there's a mistake but don’t make it twice. So I say, “Listen, unless you did surgery that I didn’t permit, or you did surgery on the wrong dog, this is wrong. You're calling the wrong person. My dog is constipated. We left her at the hospital. She got a laxative and they recommended we leave her overnight for observation.”
And the woman says, “Can you just hold one more time?” She clicks off again and I’m just sitting on the phone thinking like, “Who is taking care of my dog and why can’t they match up owner and pet properly?”
When the phone clicks again, it’s a man now. He identifies himself as Dr. Lindgren. He says, “Is your name Matthew Dicks,” and I say, “Yes.” He says, “Is your dog Kaleigh,” and I say, “Yes.”
And he says, “Mr. Dicks, I just completed spinal surgery on your dog and I’m getting ready to do the second surgery. She has a ruptured disc in her back.”
And I say, “That’s not possible. She's constipated.”
And he says, “Mr. Dicks, we spoke last night in the middle of the night. I explained all of this to you and you gave me permission to do this surgery.”
And my heart sinks. I think I know exactly what’s happened. So I ask him, “Can I call you back in a couple of minutes,” and he says, “No. I will be operating on your dog. We can’t wait.”
So he gives me the name and the number of another doctor and he says, “Call this doctor for information.”
I hang up the phone and I run. I run out of my classroom and I take a left up the ramp to my fiancé’s classroom. She works two doors down from me. When I left this morning she was still asleep but she's probably coming in right now. It’s about the time she comes to work.
As I burst through her door she's coming through the opposite door. She's got her coat on. She's got bags. I’m panting. She looks up at me and she says, “Is Kaleigh okay?”
And I say, “Do you know about a surgery?”
She says, “Yes.” Now I know exactly what has happened.
I've been sleepwalking all of my life. Since I was a little boy I would get out of bed a couple hours after going to sleep and come down the stairs and I'd sit on the couch next to my parents. They would be watching a movie or the Celtics. Sometimes I would just sit and I'd stare at the TV but a lot of the times I would talk to them and they would talk back to me.
They would ask me questions that I would never acknowledge in real life. They're like horrible people who would just draw information from me that no child would ever admit to. Like what girls do I like and what teachers do I hate and which one of them do I like the most right now. Then the next morning at breakfast they would bring all this stuff back up and make fun of me. It was a joy to live with these people.
But I did this all the time. People imagine sleepwalkers as someone who closed their eyes and sort of wander around the room with their hands outstretched but it’s really not like that at all. I always describe it as having two operating systems. I have the primary one, which is operating right now taking care of all of my functions, but when I go to sleep occasionally a second operating system comes online.
It’s just like the first one. I can do just about everything that I can do awake that I’m doing while I’m sleepwalking except the two operating systems don’t know that each other exist and so I never remember anything that I’m doing while I’m sleepwalking.
I'll get out of bed. It’s usually a couple hours after a person has gone to sleep that they'll start sleepwalking. Just before REM sleep is about to begin, people will get up and start wandering around. Sleepwalkers tend to get out of bed and sleepwalk at times of stress, when they're over-tired, if they’ve taken a medication they've never taken before, or they're in a new place, a new bed or a new location they've never been in before.
So when I was a boy scout, we would go camping in the woods and I would get out of my tent in the middle of the night and just walk into the woods, into the dark, until I tripped on a root or a rock and it woke me up. Then I would look around and I'd have no idea where I was in the dark so I'd have to sit at the base of a tree and I'd wait all night until eventually my friends at camp would wake up. I'd hear them and I'd be able to wander my way back to camp.
When I got older and I was on my own, I was a McDonald’s manager and I would often find myself, I'd wake up I'd be behind the wheel of my car in the parking lot with my McDonald’s uniform on just ready to drive away but, thankfully, never actually doing so. But it was a terrifying thing to figure out in am I in the parking lot or am I actually driving somewhere down the street.
Nowadays, sleepwalking takes me to many places. I often find myself sitting on the couch at night with the remote in my hand pointing it at the TV that is not on. The thing I do most often is I eat cereal at night. And I only know this because I'll come down in the morning and I'll find a half-eaten bowl of cheerios on the counter. Oftentimes there's a book or a magazine next to it and it’s open and I have no recollection of reading the pages, and I don't even really know if I did. But I’m consuming vast quantities of cereal in the middle of the night.
Recently, I made the terrible decision of agreeing to two deadlines to two different books at the same time which no writer should ever, ever do, and so I was under a lot of pressure. One morning I came down and I found that my laptop was open and there were 500 words written on my laptop for the novel I was working on that I have no recollection of ever writing. The words didn’t actually match what was already there. They were the beginning of the next chapter, but they were good enough that they are still the beginning of the next chapter.
I am writing books in my sleep. That is serious productivity. So it’s not totally weird that I've had this phone call with this veterinary person but it is really kind of crazy.
Elysha doesn’t even believe at first that this has happened. She says, “Matt, we were awake. We turned on the lights. You were on the phone.”
And I say, “I don't remember any of it.” I say, “What is happening?”
And she tells me that in the middle of the night they discover that it wasn’t constipation, that Kaleigh was having a spinal issue and that she had a rupture in one of the discs, which is something that happens to these little dogs with these long backs. So the doctor told us that she had to have a first surgery to clear out the debris and she had a 50% chance of surviving that surgery. And then she would have to have a second surgery, the one that’s happening right now, which would restabilize her spine. And she has a 50% chance of surviving that surgery.
Even if she survives both of them, she has a less than 50% chance of really ever walking again. It’s most likely that she's going to end up in a doggie wheelchair with her hind legs on wheels and her front legs pulling her around. And that for the rest of her life, we will have to catheter her and have a colostomy bag because she won’t be able to do any of those functions for herself.
The operation costs $7,000, which is the amount of money that we have saved for our upcoming honeymoon. And I ask Elysha, “We agreed to all that?” And she says, “Yes.”
I didn’t realize that there were different depths of love. Like Kaleigh is our dog, but at the time she's my dog. I started with her and she's not an easy dog to live with. And Elysha said yes instantly, without question. I started at my future wife and I just couldn’t believe how much more I was in love with her.
So I wait for the phone call which comes three hours later and they say she survived the second surgery. And I say, “Do you think she’ll walk?” And he said, “It’s very unlikely but we don’t know. It will be a long time before we know.”
I get to bring Kaleigh home three days after the surgery. We have to get the house ready before we bring her home. She can’t jump up or down off anything so we take our bed down because she sleeps with us at night. We sleep on a mattress on the floor and we built a cage around the mattress because we can’t even let her get off the mattress. So for months Elysha, myself and Kaleigh will sleep on the floor on a mattress in a cage.
We pushed things up against the furniture that she often jumps up on because we really can’t have her come up on anything at all.
When we bring her home, she's a waste of what she used to be. She has lost weight and she's shaven. But the worst thing is she's just sad. She's a dog who just had a terrible thing happen to her and she has no idea why someone has done this thing. And there's no way to explain to her that this terrible thing had to happen to you so you could keep living. She walks around with her head down and I know that she's in incredible pain.
So we put her on a towel next to us on that first night and she's just lying there. She really hasn’t moved at all. We watch TV and we wait until she finally falls asleep then we move over to the couch. We’re watching TV on the couch when I see her head pick up. She looks at me and she starts to struggle up on her front legs. I want to stop her because it’s too early for her to even try to walk around but I watch as she lifts up her hind legs too. Before I know it, she's standing on all four legs and she starts to hobble over towards us one tiny step at a time. She's walking.
I call the doctor the next day and I tell him, I say, “She's already walking,” and he says, “That’s impossible.” And I say, “I know, but it happened.”
Kaleigh is 16 years old today and she is still with me. Every morning I wake up and the first thing I do is I check to see if she's still breathing, because she is an old dog. She has bad skin that makes the entire house smell. She is completely deaf. She is slightly blind. She doesn’t run anymore but she hobbles around our house and she eats and she snores and she still sits at my feet while I write every single morning.
I've been asked many, many times, “Do you think you would have made that decision if you hadn’t been sleepwalking? If you had been fully awake would you have agreed to those ridiculous odds and spent that enormous amount of money on your dog?”
And I understand the question. It’s a reasonable question to ask if you're not me. But if you're me, you know that Kaleigh was a thing that I loved as much as anything else in the world, and she still is. She is a member of our family.
If you're me or if you're Elysha you know that there really wasn’t a decision to make that night whether you were awake or whether you were asleep. When the doctor called and gave us the odds and told us how much it was going to cost, I know it was an easy decision. It was a decision I could have made in my sleep. Thank you.
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