The Big Boondoggle

So I needed to be placed in a skilled nursing facility but all twenty-eight in Onondaga County turned me down.  How could that be?

Maybe we should talk to St. Joseph’s Hospital, which wrote and sent the case report to the nursing homes.  And they wrote and sent it without any oversight by me or my representative, who were both supposed to be involved in the discharge planning process.  You think I could have written a case report that would have gotten me admitted to a nursing home?  You bet I could have.  They would have been fighting each other to get me.

Let it also be noted that nowhere has St. Joseph’s put into the record the very significant fact that I am suffering from lithium poisoning.  The poisoning was accomplished by Dr. Jenifer Rich, director of St. Joe’s inpatient psychiatry prior to Roger Levine.  What reason might St. Joe’s have for omitting the diagnosis of lithium poisoning from the information they send out about me?

So, I was sent home with a virtually blank discharge plan, then what happened?

Well, the first couple of days were really nice.  Back in my own electric bed!  Eating my own food!  Admiring my own houseplants!  Watching my own television shows.  Life was pretty good.  Of course, my blood sugar kept rising; two-week average now is 370, and that makes me very tired.  I needed to think, to plan, but high blood sugar also mucks up the brain.  I became easily confused and frustrated.

I—who had been on total care in the hospital—was discharged home with one aide who only worked three mornings a week (nine hours).  And has attention deficit disorder, which she didn’t tell me about in the interview.  She doesn’t manage it well, and I manage it even less well.

So we got the county in here the day after I got home and, sooner or later, more or less, they authorized twenty-eight hours a week for aides.  Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but finding aides to fill the hours is another ball of wax.  Steve, my close friend and as good a son as any woman could hope for, hired another aide who has turned out to be a peach—except that she has dyslexia and can’t read a recipe.

So now we have me, with executive dysfunction learning disability and confusion from high blood sugar, one aide with dyslexia, and a second with attention deficit disorder.  Does anybody think this is going to work out well?  Who is going to be in charge?  Who is going to make decisions?

Uh-h-h, Stevie.  Problem is, Stevie has no experience with being old, next to none with being disabled, and absolutely none with being poor.  Try to imagine playing Monopoly without money.  Instead of buying and selling, you have to figure who are the system players to whom you have to say please and thank you.  And I am notoriously poor at the please-and-thank-you thing, consequent to having been poor since 1991.  Trust me, the way America treats its poor folks does not warrant a please or thank you.

So Stevie and I are trying to work our way through the system.  One of Steve’s greatest gifts is that he knows who and what he is.  So do Dr. Edwards, Amelia, Olivia and very few others.  It’s called “being a grown-up” and they are few and far between.  Being a grown-up means that you can look at me and say, “Sheesh, Annie’s sick.  What can I do to help her?”

Not being a grown-up means that when I snap and say something snarky, then you get your panties in a twist, take it personally, blame me for hurting you, get mad and walk away.  Folks, my brain is failing:  deal with it.  Stop blaming me for bad behavior!  Blame the sickness.

Sheesh.

So we are trying—really hard—to figure out when and how to channel everything through Steve, and what and when I can deal with things.  The way it should happen—the way it did happen in my grandmother’s world—was that three generations would live together and when grandma got upset then someone younger, who lived in, would screen the calls and handle the tough stuff.  Nobody lives in with me.

So I get a line on the NYS Dept. of Health “Nursing Home Transition and Diversion” program.  Wow!  Does that sound perfect???  It’s designed to put everything a nursing home would provide directly into the patient’s home.  Great!  Terrific!  We’re on our way, right?

Wrong.  The program is run through Arise independent living center.  First, they try to tell us I don’t qualify because it’s for people with traumatic brain injury.  Wrong.  It is also for people over sixty-five who are just plain wrecked.  Then they tell us that skilled nursing won’t come to the home.  Bullshit.  Nurses always make home visits.  And it goes on and on, just trying to get a home visit from these people at Arise.

We filed the application on Friday, May 3.  The state regulations say there will be a home visit within two weeks.  Arise scheduled it for June 4, a month distant.  Under duress, they backed it up:  late next week they will come.

Let me tell you about this week.  In a hospital or nursing home, the staff take the responsibility for draining catheter bags as needed.  At home, me being too sick and tired to get up and empty it, the bag ruptured and there was urine all over the place.  And it was 10:00 p.m. and no aide would arrive for eleven hours.

My aide changed the tubing on my breathing machine.  She’d never done it before.  She did it wrong but I was too sick and tired to check her work.  Sometime after midnight, I woke up with the machine not working.  And the company that supplied it wasn’t answering their phone.  I slept not at all the rest of the night.

By the time the aide arrived, I was gone.  I could hear her, but was completely unresponsive to her tapping my hand and calling me.  I was way, way down some long dark tunnel that seemed to stretch into northern Canada—way too far away to make it back when the aide tried to rouse me.  You know the difference between “sleeping” and “unconscious?”  Sleeping means you can be awakened.

The aide stayed three hours, made coffee, failed to rouse me, and checked out without telling anyone.  Didn’t call Stevie, the agency, 911—nothing.  Just walked away and left me alone and unresponsive.  And she didn’t turn off the coffee either.

Apria Healthcare–Not

I woke up sometime after midnight with my auto-BiPAP not working right. It’s blowing really loudly for about a minute and then shutting off for about a minute and then blowing really loudly for about a minute and then shutting off, and so on and on.

At 12:57 I called Apria Healthcare, the auto-BiPAP supplier (463-5217). First I got some high level response, then eventually I got Scott, the local respiratory therapist. He told me that I own the machine and therefore he has to get a prescription from the doctor to come and swap out the machine and send mine for repair.

Scott started out by telling me that they only will call the doctor during regular business hours. I tried to explain my need to him–multiple major illnesses; my usage of the auto-BiPAP runs as high as a pressure setting of 21 (which is really high), etc. Scott was resistant but finally agreed to call the doctor and then call me back.

He did not do so.

After waiting half an hour, I called his cell phone number but he did not answer.

Checked glucose and it was 481.

Around 1:30 I called Apria again, got the “national” response again–Allie (?).  She said she would call Scott and then one of them would call me back.

Around 1:45 Allie called back and said that Scott wasn’t answering her, either. I explained to her about the diabetes, kidney disease and living alone. She said her protocol directed her to wait another fifteen minutes and then “go higher”–presumably to Scott’s boss.

I haven’t slept without a CPAP/BiPAP/auto-BiPAP in a dozen years.

My plan is to do nothing, quite possibly because my glucose is so high that I’m not traveling in a normal thinking zone.

2:55 a.m.–Allie has just called back. She has called–repeatedly–every telephone number listed (land lines, cell phones and nextel [?]) for all four employees of the Syracuse Apria office (located on Molloy Rd.) Manager, tech, respiratory, plus one unknown–nobody is responding to a desperate middle-of-the-night need for breathing assistance. Allie is in Arizona and neither she nor her supervisor know of anything else to do. The next nearest offices to Syracuse are in Rochester, Endwell (Binghamton) and Elmira. Allie and I are in agreement that it is unforgivable for a supplier of breathing machines to not be responding to an emergency. Allie is putting it in writing and sending it up the line.

If this night ends disastrously for me, please raise hell with Apria corporate headquarters and get the Syracuse office in trouble.

Thank you and good night.

Anne

Victors v. Dorkheads

Yesterday I noted that I got a big envelope from Kansas tourism addressed to “Anne F U Woodlen-Ashole.”  http://annecwoodlen.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/pixie-dust-and-cowards/

Research shows that the address was entered from a computer accessing the Kansas web site.  After that—from Kansas to my mailbox—no human being laid eyes on the address.  Both Kansas and the U.S. Postal Service do it all with machines.  Huh—some “civilization” we have here, isn’t it?

Well, I talked to a nice man in Kansas (I picture him wearing a suit and tie, sitting in a high-rise office building, and being surrounded by corn fields) and he back-tracked the address, removed it from their mailing list and apologized to me.  That was really nice.

Then I talked to someone who’s putting it in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service.  They’ve got lots of investigators who follow up on stuff like this.  The mailman who put this in my mailbox without looking at the label will also be talked to.

What gets me is this dorkhead in the dark, hunched over his/her computer keyboard, going on different web sites to hassle me this way.  Why doesn’t he/she/it just come get in my face and say, “I’m really angry at you?”  That’s what grownups do.

All the people with whom I associate try to live a life in the light.  We are people who choose happiness, try to be positive, and want to do good things.  We don’t always succeed.  We have our dark moments, but never so dark that we’d rub our hands with glee and settle down in front of the computer to bring malicious events into someone else’s life.

When I hassle people, it is for one reason only:  they have failed to do the job for which they were paid.  Since I am poor and under the thumb of Big Government, that usually means I’m filing complaints against government agencies and their representatives.

When I file a complaint, I always view it as a class action on behalf of all the other people like me who are getting substandard services.  It’s about taking care of people.  And if people who are paid by Medicare, Medicaid, HUD, the NYS Department of Health, Centro, the NYS Office of Mental Health, and so on and so forth, actually did their jobs at the level required by law then I could just sit here and um . . . ah, I have no idea what I’d do.  I’ll never have to find out because Big Government and human laziness, bigotry and greed will always give me something to complain about.

This dorkhead-in-the-dark who’s now sending me crap reminds me of when I was in St. Joseph’s Hospital and filing complaints about the substandard nursing.  I started getting hang-up phone calls in the middle of the night.  Can you believe that?  Somebody on the hospital staff—probably a nurse or his/her confederate—was making harassing phone calls to a patient.

Last year when Aaron Sorkin spoke at the Syracuse University Commencement, he said, “Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.”  Ten thousand people sit there and take the shit that’s raining down on them, and they don’t get hurt—not in any personal, intentional way.  They just get the impersonal humiliation and degradation that is generated by a system that’s gone astray, and they have nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine other people to complain to.

I take the risk, and “the first person through the wall always gets hurt.”  So be it.  I will not lie down and let the people in the system roll over me.  I will not be a victim; I will be a victor.

And let me tell you, standing up for your rights feels really, really terrific and makes you a winner.

Pixie Dust and Cowards

A friend of mine once said of me “Anne won’t stab you in the back.  She’ll stab you in the chest and you’ll see it coming.”  I thought of this the day I went to see Frank Kobliski, executive director of Centro bus company.  I handed him my complaint to the Federal Transit Administration’s Office of Civil Rights that was going to get him federally investigated.  He asked if he could make a copy of it.  I said, “No need—I brought this copy for you.”  I promise you, I will look you in the eye and tell you what hurt I’m bringing on you.

The manager of my apartment building has expressed profuse appreciation that when I find something really wrong with the way the building is being managed, I go tell her.  She says she usually doesn’t find out there’s a problem until a tenant has brought some outside agency in to hassle her.  I don’t understand that.  I don’t understand why you wouldn’t go face-to-face with a person if you’ve got a problem with him, her or it.  (I had been going face-to-face with Frank Kobliski for a year or two before I gave up and filed a federal complaint.) 

Of course, there are physicians.  If your friendly local physician gets pissed off at you and decides to kick you out of his practice then he sends you a certified letter saying that you’ve got to get a new physician.  He will handle emergency care for one month, then you’re through.  And s/he doesn’t have to give a reason.  Honest to God, in this world of grownups, your physician can terminate your treatment without telling you why.  I mean, are we seriously mature here, or what?

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is that somebody is out to get me, and I don’t know who or why—but I can make a good guess.

On April 17 I was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital’s inpatient psychiatric unit with Dr. Roger Levine attending.  Levine is also the director of the unit, and was the director of CPEP (Community Psychiatric Emergency Program).  I’ve known Levine forty years and I think he’s a bad psychiatrist and a nasty human being.  While I was inpatient, I filed a grievance against him with the hospital’s medical director.  When I was being discharged, Levine asked me if I was going to hurt myself.  I replied, “No.  I’m going to hurt you—I’m going to file a complaint against your license.”

After I was discharged, I did file a complaint against Levine’s license with the NYS Office of Professional Medical Conduct and posted it on my blogs at http://behindthelockeddoors.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/roger-levine-m-d-part-i/ and http://annecwoodlen.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/complaint-against-roger-levine-m-d/ .  A few days later I got three big envelopes of advertising in the mail—two were from window blind companies, the third was a tourism thing.  The freaky thing was that they all had my address, and my name and Levine’s on them—“Anne Woodlen-Levine,” “Anne Levine,” etc.  I had a deep, negative visceral reaction to seeing our names linked.  I showed them to a friend and then threw them out, not wanting such a toxic reminder in my home.

A few days later, I got another big envelope, also from some tourism agency, also addressed to Woodlen/Levine.  I showed it to another friend and then threw it out.

Yesterday’s big envelope is from Kansas tourism and is addressed to “Anne F U Woodlen-Ashole.”

Harassment by tourism?  That’s weird.  Using the U.S. Postal Service to cuss me out?  That’s freaky.

I despise cowards.  People who hide in dark corners and take potshots at other people.  I get that from time to time on this blog—people writing anonymously or under assumed names to tell me what a terrible person I am, and how nobody believes me, and what their lawyers are going to do to me.

It hurts.  They score their points, even though I know that I’m living a pretty clean, righteous life, and anybody with any sense believes me, and no lawyer in her or his right mind would take a case against me.  In the first place, I am independently poor so nobody is going to win any money off me, and lawyers only and always sue for money (or property—my most valuable property being a five-year-old $8500 wheelchair).  In the second place, these dorkheads don’t know the difference between slander and libel:

“. . . Two torts that involve the communication of false information about a person, a group, or an entity such as a corporation. Libel is any Defamation that can be seen, such as a writing, printing, effigy, movie, or statue. Slander is any defamation that is spoken and heard.”

If I’m committing anything on this blog then it is libel, not slander, however the ultimate defense against libel is telling the truth.  I am exceedingly careful not to pass out false information.  A court recently ruled that it’s not libel if a normal person of average intelligence knows it’s not true, for example, it’s not libel if I say that Roger Levine dances in ballet shoes with pixie dust on his shoulders (pixie dust enables humans to fly)  because any sensible person would know that I don’t mean that as a concrete, proven truth.  I have never seen Roger Levine fly.

So some coward is out there, hunkered down over his computer keyboard, putting me on mailing lists and filing nasty words on the address label.  I reckon that the U.S. Postal Service isn’t going to take kindly to that.

But what is really scary is that there is someone so twisted and warped that they’d spend their time doing this.  Can you imagine?  I mean, seriously, can you imagine the sick-o who’s doing this?

Now let’s get back to the critical business of filing complaints against Roger Levine and St. Joseph’s Hospital for their failure to provide treatment that meets the standards set by the NYS Office of Mental Health and the NYS Department of Health.  I’ve got serious problems to take care of here.  I will leave the pixie dust to Levine.

Saturday 20 April, Continued

Last night at 6:20 p.m. I called the nurses’ station and asked when supper would be served.  I was told that it had been served at 6:00 p.m.  When I asked why my tray had not been brought, there was no answer.  When the tray was brought, I had to eat stone-cold rigatoni with meat sauce.

An essential part of infection control is being able to wash your hands with hot soapy water after a bowel movement.  The “new” sinks on 3-6 do not have handles or faucets.  The sink has push buttons for hot and cold water and a hole through which water spouts.  The buttons only stay pushed for fifteen seconds—not long enough to fill a denture cup in one go.  In order to get warm water, you have to stand and wait and push the button six to eight times.  The water only “spouts” ¼ to ½ inch from the wall of the bowl.  You cannot get your hands under the water to wash off soap.  There are no paper or cloth towels in the bathroom.  In the bedroom, a staff person has put the cloth towels and wash cloths on top of the wardrobe about three feet above my head.  When I call the nurses’ station, I am brought a towel with someone else’s matted hair in it.

The tray table has not been cleaned.  As I write, the paper is sticking to the dirty surface.

I have multiple medical illnesses.  I have been using an electric wheelchair for about ten years and an electric hospital bed for about fifteen.

I was admitted here to a standard psychiatric bed, which is a foam pad in a wooden box.  I have an indwelling catheter.  Standard hospital beds have intentional places to hang catheter bags; psych beds do not.  Staff jammed the bag hook over the edge of the bed but it wouldn’t stay and repeatedly was left lying on the floor.

I was too sick to get out of bed.  The first morning I awoke around 5:45 a.m. feeling terrible and rushed to the bathroom.  I was soaked with sweat, shaking, and lights were flashing inside my head.  I pushed the call bell and collapsed on the floor.  Staff came and found my blood sugar to be 65.  They brought glucose, then I requested and received 4 oz. of orange juice.  I had a second bowel movement then was assisted back to bed.  My glucose was 67.  The staff—R.N. Amber, I think—left me alone over my objection.  I was too sick to get out of bed.  The only call bell was located on the far side of the room above and behind a dresser.  I am only 5’1”.  Under the best of circumstances, it’s hard for me to reach the call bell; under these circumstances it was impossible.

The night before when my blood sugar was 65 in the Observation Unit I immediately was given a full cup of apple juice and a ham and cheese sandwich, followed by more juice and food, 15-minute Accu-Chek, and staff constantly with me for about an hour.  I had overdosed on a long-acting insulin; this was no simple diabetic hypoglycemia.

On Psych, they brought me pretzels that were too dry to swallow.  When I objected to being left alone, the nurse said, “I have 16 other patients.”  When my glucose reached 70, she said I would not be checked again for forty minutes.

At some point a tap bell was put on the stand by my bed.  I had two more bowel movements.  Then I tapped frantically to no avail.  No one came.  I threw up on the floor.

Sunday 21 April

The Psychiatric Unit of St. Joseph’s Hospital has an ethos and policy structure that denies physical disability; they discriminate based on physical disability.  In the words of one charge nurse, “This is a mental unit, not a medical unit.”  And with a single sweeping statement, 3-6 denies reality.

• My meals are served cold.  Able-bodied people go to the Day Room and pick up their hot meals.  Trays for bedridden people are set aside and may or may not be delivered if or when a staff person gets around to it.
• On a previous hospitalization, my doctor ordered a wheelchair.  The staff refused to push it.  A therapy aide with a bachelor’s degree in art and no medical training said he saw no reason why I should have a wheelchair.
• I am currently in an old-fashioned manual hospital bed, which has to be hand-cranked.  Sometimes when I call the nurses’ station and request that the head be raised or lowered, the staff response is a resistant, “Why can’t you do it yourself?”  Fact:  If a patient is sick enough to qualify for a hospital bed on a psychiatric unit then the patient is too sick to hop out of that bed and hand-crank it.
• Significant numbers of staff members in authority base their actions on moral judgment, not reasonable psychiatric or medical assessment.

Yesterday morning I woke around 6:00 a.m. needing to be assisted to the bathroom.  I pressed the nurses’ call bell three times.  Three times it was turned off without anyone opening the intercom or coming to my room.  I had diarrhea in bed.  I made it to the bathroom, pressed the call bell there, R.N. Amber came, asked what I needed, and I requested clean sheets.  She and her co-worker [possibly Megan] stripped the bed and left.  I knew I was going to collapse on the floor if I tried to remain on the commode so I went back and lay on the bare mattress.  When Amber+1 returned, she asked if it was hypoglycemia.  Not knowing, I shrugged.  Amber did not check my blood sugar.

This One’s for Duckie

On April 16 my doctor said, “There’s nothing more that can be done [to treat your illness], adding “I usually only have this conversation with people in end-stage cancer.”  He signed my death warrant that day.

It took me thirty days to get to where I could say, “I may be dying—but I’m not dead yet!”

What the stupid schmuck should have said was “There’s nothing more that can be done—so let’s talk about the course the illness will take, and let’s come up with a plan for how you’re going to live the rest of your life.”

What doctors do best is diagnose.  An astute diagnosis tells you what’s wrong, which then lets you consider options.  People who self-diagnose are idiots.  I diagnosed myself with a pulled muscle in my hip when in fact I had twisted my sacroiliac:  two very different courses of treatment.  One friend diagnosed herself with cancer when what she had was an infection.  Another friend—well, I won’t share that one, but here’s the important thing:  if something is wrong, go ask your doctor what it is.

What doctors don’t do at all well is treat.  They load you up with drugs that do more damage than good.  There are a bazillion natural treatments that will get you out of your own way so your body can do its natural healing thing—naturopathy, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, medical massage, veganism, various manipulations of light and air—there are so many ways to heal that don’t include putting manmade chemicals in your body.  Get a good diagnosis and then look around for healthy ways to treat yourself.

What doctors do worst is make prognoses.  Nobody can tell the future—your doctor can’t do it any better than your psychic reader.  The difference between the two is that your psychic will be very up-front and tell you that her predictions can be altered at any time by you making a different choice.  Your doctor thinks he actually knows what your future is.

When I was on life support in the ICU, a bunch of doctors told my mother that there was nothing more to be done and it was unlikely that I could survive.  What they meant was she gonna die—now, but they carefully couched it in doctor-speak to cover their butts.

That was thirteen years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, your life is in God’s hands.  Only he knows when you’re going to die.  Don’t believe anybody else.  (Maybe God woke up this morning, stretched, and said, “Charlie’s pissed me off one time too many—today he goes.”  Or maybe God said, “Annie has got so much going for her—maybe I’ll help her out one more time so she can maximize her potential.”  [Except that God doesn’t use language like that.])

So I woke up this morning having some confused dream about Brian and computers and death.  I don’t pretend to have figured out what it all means, but let me tell you about Brian’s wife.   She was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and the doctor’s prognosis was that she would be able to work and live a relatively normal life for about another ten years.  Fact:  within a year she was down and out.  Within three years, she was receiving total care from her husband, and when I say “total care” what I mean is she sat in a chair and he did everything except feed her and poop for her.  Within a couple more years, her husband was suicidal.  Being the total care provider sure takes it out of you.

We had a friendly relationship in the beginning but in the end I was really angry at her.  She loved her husband but wasn’t doing anything to take care of him.  In fact, she wasn’t doing anything.  The woman still had her mind.  She and Brian were both computer scientists and he supplied all kinds of assistive technology but she used it to play computer games when she could have been doing so much more.

So what does that say about me?  What can I do?  What do I have left?  I can still be wise for younger women.  Yesterday I listened to a young woman trying to work her way through a very painful experience in her life (oh, hell, relationship—it’s always about human relationships).  As she left she said to me, “You know, you ask good questions.”  There you go, I’m a good question asker.

I have two blogs wherein I have posted 822 essays; that’s the equivalent of about six books.  They have been read 106,386 times, which is about how many times a day your heart beats—and I haven’t done any advertising.  What do I have left?  Well, maybe publishing some books.  (Who reads books anymore?  Anybody?)  I’ve got something left in the way of writing, though less than I used to.  High glucose levels slow down the brain and make thoughts lazy and fuzzy.  (So now, instead of being really smart I’ll just be average?)

End-of-life planning is about what you still can do, not the fact that you can’t do much anymore.  Only God knows when the end will come, and he ain’t tellin’.

Remarks by Aaron Sorkin (‘83) (Part II)

In the summer of 1983, after I graduated, I moved to New York to begin my life as a struggling writer. I got a series of survival jobs that included bartending, ticket-taking, telemarketing, limo driving, and dressing up as a moose to pass out leaflets in a mall. I ran into a woman who’d been a senior here when I was a freshman. I asked her how it was going and how she felt Syracuse had prepared her for the early stages of her career. She said, “Well, the thing is, after three years you start to forget everything they taught you in college. But once you’ve done that, you’ll be fine.” I laughed because I thought it was funny and also because I wanted to ask her out, but I also think she was wrong.

As a freshman drama student—and this story is now becoming famous—I had a play analysis class—it was part of my requirement. The professor was Gerardine Clark. (Applause) If anybody was wondering, the drama students are sitting over there (applause). The play analysis class met for 90 minutes twice a week. We read two plays a week and we took a 20-question true or false quiz at the beginning of the session that tested little more than whether or not we’d read the play. The problem was that the class was at 8:30 in the morning, it met all the way down on East Genesee, I lived all the way up at Brewster/Boland, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but from time to time the city of Syracuse experiences inclement weather. All this going to class and reading and walking through snow, wind chill that’s apparently powered by jet engines, was having a negative effect on my social life in general and my sleeping in particular. At one point, being quizzed on “Death of a Salesman,” a play I had not read, I gave an answer that indicated that I wasn’t aware that at the end of the play the salesman dies. And I failed the class. I had to repeat it my sophomore year; it was depressing, frustrating and deeply embarrassing. And it was without a doubt the single most significant event that occurred in my evolution as a writer. I showed up my sophomore year and I went to class, and I paid attention, and we read plays and I paid attention, and we discussed structure and tempo and intention and obstacle, possible improbabilities, improbable impossibilities, and I paid attention, and by God when I got my grades at the end of the year, I’d turned that F into a D. I’m joking: it was pass/fail.

But I stood at the back of the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington watching a pre-Broadway tryout of my plays, knowing that when the curtain came down, I could go back to my hotel room and fix the problem in the second act with the tools that Gerry Clark gave me. Eight years ago, I was introduced to Arthur Miller at a Dramatists Guild function and we spent a good part of the evening talking. A few weeks later when he came down with the flu he called and asked if I could fill in for him as a guest lecturer at NYU. The subject was “Death of a Salesman.” You made a good decision coming to school here.

I’ve made some bad decisions. I lost a decade of my life to cocaine addiction. You know how I got addicted to cocaine? I tried it. The problem with drugs is that they work, right up until the moment that they decimate your life. Try cocaine, and you’ll become addicted to it. Become addicted to cocaine, and you will either be dead, or you will wish you were dead, but it will only be one or the other. My big fear was that I wasn’t going to be able to write without it. There was no way I was going to be able to write without it. Last year I celebrated my 11-year anniversary of not using coke. (Applause) Thank you. In those 11 years, I’ve written three television series, three movies, a Broadway play, won the Academy Award and taught my daughter all the lyrics to “Pirates of Penzance.” I have good friends.

You’ll meet a lot of people who, to put it simply, don’t know what they’re talking about. In 1970 a CBS executive famously said that there were four things that we would never, ever see on television: a divorced person, a Jewish person, a person living in New York City and a man with a moustache. By 1980, every show on television was about a divorced Jew who lives in New York City and goes on a blind date with Tom Selleck.  (To be continued)