Now Milton, who celebrated his 56th birthday Saturday, weighs 272.
“Like a million dollars” was how he described the benefit of the weight loss.
But it’s not so much the pounds that you notice, it’s the way his four-month medical journey has pivoted his perspective.
“I have a different view of life,” he said last week after being released from the hospital. “I appreciate the small things. You know, my friends, team of relatives, the ones who have been at my side this whole time.”
Many of those supporters were there last Sunday to surprise Milton as his sister, Terri Glenn, drove her SUV down Fourteen Avenue to Young Street where he lives next to Bethel AME Church. The cars spilled out of the church parking lot as they lined both sides of the street. Many of the 100 well-wishers were Milton’s 1984 Middletown High School classmates.
“I could not ask for more from Middletown,” he said.
At the welcome home celebration, Milton sat on a chair in the driveway and talked about the last several months. There were many medical milestones, he told the group. Then he announced: “I got a long road ahead.”
There was a time when the road appeared to be a dead-end.
As Jasmine Davis, 36, his niece said, Milton was “closer to death than to life.”
Milton remembers lying in his hospital bed thinking death was standing in the doorway. He was so heavily medicated that he hallucinated. He thought his nurse was a serial killer.
“I figured it was just my time,” he said when asked if he was scared.
He has had heart issues for years and his surgeon told him he had two choices: Move into a nursing home under Hospice care or have a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) inserted. A LVAD helps pump blood from the lower chambers of the heart to the rest of the body.
Milton, a Middletown funeral director, told the surgeon he’s familiar with Hospice. So he chose the LVAD.
“Easy choice,” he said.
Eventually, he will be placed on a heart transplant list. Then wait for a matching donor to die.
Until then, he’s learning to walk again and trying to regain the strength that made him a standout high school quarterback.
Since October, Milton has been at UC West Chester for two days, then UC Medical Center, the intensive care unit, the step down unit, back to the ICU. He was transported to Drake Center on Feb. 2.
He has been placed on permanent disability.
Davis called the beginning of December “such a dark time” for the family because relatives were thinking what God wanted for him and that was “absolutely devastating” to consider.
“There is absolutely nothing you can tell me about miracles,” she said. “Four months I have watched with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and touched with my own hands a miracle that seemed impossible.”
It’s always interesting when someone walks in the shadow of death and you ask them how that experience changed them. More times than not, they mention God. Milton is no different.
“How good God is to people who don’t deserve it,” he said he learned. “He just keeps blessing me in spite of me. God is good to fools. God is not through with me yet. He has something for me to do. I’m waiting on Him. He’s gonna show me what I need to do.”
About the Author
