This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks’s story, Sleepwalking Thru Kaleigh’s Surgery, at a Boston Moth StorySLAM.
I’m standing in my classroom, about half an hour before the school day starts, when my phone rings. I answer it, and a woman on the other end tells me that she has good news. My dog has survived the first surgery, and they’re getting ready for the second one. I tell her, “No, you’ve called the wrong person. My dog is at the hospital, but she’s just constipated and being watched in case she explodes in some horrible way.”
The woman apologizes and says, “Could you hold for a moment?” She clicks off, and as I wait, I think about how someone in the world is waiting to hear if their dog survived surgery. I just can’t imagine it. My dog’s name is Kaylee, she’s a white Lhasa Apso, and she’s my best friend. I can’t imagine getting that phone call.
The woman clicks back on, but it’s not her anymore. A man’s voice says, “Mr. Dicks, my name is Dr. Lindgren. I just did spinal surgery on your dog, and I’m about to begin a second surgery.” I’m confused and respond, “That’s not possible.” He says, “Last night, I called you at 2:00 AM and told you your dog wasn’t constipated. She had a spinal rupture, and you agreed to the surgery.”
Instantly, I know exactly what has happened. I ask, “Can I call you back in a minute?” He responds, “No, I need to do surgery on your dog right now or she’ll die.” He gives me a number to call, and I hang up.
I run out of my classroom, up the hallway, and into my wife’s classroom. I didn’t see her this morning because she sleeps in and I leave early. She’s walking in, hands full of bags, and she sees me and asks, “How’s Kaylee?” I say, “You know, she had surgery,” and she replies, “Yes, you don’t know?” Now I know for sure I’ve been sleepwalking my entire life.
When people talk about sleepwalking, they usually think of people wandering around the house, banging into walls. But that’s not what it’s like. I compare it to having two operating systems in my head. One is running right now, allowing me to tell this story, but the second one comes online about once a month. It does everything this first system does, except it doesn’t talk to the other one. So when I sleepwalk, I have no memory of what I’ve done.
When I was a kid, I would wander down a couple of hours after going to bed and sit with my parents, watching the Celtics. They’d ask, “So what girl do you like now, Matt?” And I’d say, “Melissa’s our it.” Then in the morning, they’d ask, “Who’s Melissa’s our it?” and I’d have no idea what they were talking about. When I was in Boy Scouts, the Scoutmaster had to tie my ankle to a tree because otherwise, I’d wander out of the tent and just walk into the woods until I tripped on a root. I’d wake up, have no idea where I was, and sit at the base of a tree until everyone woke up and I figured out where camp was.
Nowadays, when I sleepwalk, I mostly eat cereal at night. I only know this because I come downstairs in the morning and find half-eaten bowls of Cheerios, sometimes with a book open next to them, as if I was reading but have no recollection of it.
Last year, I signed three book contracts, which meant I had to write three books in a year. It was the worst decision I’ve ever made. There was an enormous amount of stress on me. One morning, I came downstairs and found my laptop open with 500 words written for the book I was working on. They weren’t the 500 words that matched up with what I’d been writing the night before. It was 500 words for the next chapter, but they were still the same words that exist in the book today.
My wife knows this about me. We’ve had long conversations in the middle of the night that I have no recollection of, and they strike fear into my heart in ways you can’t imagine. She says, “You were sleepwalking,” and I say, “I guess.” She says, “We turned on the lights, we talked about it for an hour,” and then she tells me that the doctor said Kaylee needed surgery, with a 50% chance of surviving the first one. She needed a second surgery to stabilize her spine, with another 50% chance of survival. Even if she survived both surgeries, she’d probably end up in a doggy wheelchair, and we’d have to catheter her and give her a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. The surgery cost $8,000. I say, “We agreed to all of that,” and she says, “Yes.”
And suddenly, I fall more in love with my wife than I ever have, because that dog is mine first. She’s not easy, and the fact that my wife agreed to all of that—I can’t believe it.
Later, while I’m teaching my students, I get a call. It’s the doctor, and he says, “She survived the surgery.” I ask, “Is she going to walk?” and he says, “I don’t think so.”
Three days later, I bring Kaylee home. She’s a mess—shaven, falling apart. The worst part is, she looks at me, and she doesn’t know why this has happened to her. I can’t tell her, and it breaks my heart. We’re sitting there watching TV that first night. She’s on a towel, asleep, and I see her wake up and look at me. She gets up on her feet and walks toward me.
I call the doctor and say, “She’s walking!” He says, “That’s impossible. She can’t do that right now.” I say, “I know, but she is.”
Kaylee passed away last summer. She lived for 18 years, and they were the 18 best years of my life. She was my best friend. When people ask me, “If you had been awake, would you have made the same decision?” I understand why they ask, because it was a lot of money for a very little chance of survival. But I always say the same thing: “Yes, I would have made the same decision. I would have made it in my sleep.”
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