“Don’t come in here! I’m getting dressed!”
“Jeeesh,
mom. No need to freak out. We’ll go around the other way.”
Trying
to stop my eighteen-year-old son and his friends from seeing me in my underwear
was just one of many challenges I faced while living in the dining room. The
space where we used to gather over meals with family and friends had become the
place where I slept, dressed and undressed, groomed, talked on the phone, and
received home nursing care. Until I became strong enough to go up and down the
stairs to my second-floor bedroom – which would take months – it was my only
post-hospitalization option for living at home.
I
remember being confused the morning of February 26, 2012, when I woke up for
the first time in a twin bed shoved into the corner of what looked like my dining room. It took
me a moment to recap . . . . I was very weak. I had one leg. I was no longer hospitalized,
which was wonderful, but I didn’t want to be stuck here in the corner! I longed
for my own room, my heavenly Queen-sized bed and its goose down comforter and buttery
soft flannel linens.
I didn’t want to
simply be in my home. I wanted to be at home. I wanted my old life back.
I knew my daughter
was upstairs, and that was a comfort. Though my teenagers divided their
time fifty-fifty between their dad’s house (five minutes down the road) and
mine, they decided that for the first month after discharge from the hospital
one or both of them would stay overnight, every night.
I turned on the
bedside lamp and looked around at how different the room looked. The leaf from the dining room table had been
removed, and what remained was shoved into the corner smack against the china
hutch. Just a couple chairs were pushed alongside. But despite all the
crowding, the room felt hollow. I noticed that the dining room and living room rugs had been
removed. In fact, all the rugs were gone, even the hall runner and the throw
rug under the kitchen sink. They were hazards for me now, I suppose. My
wheelchair could get stuck on them, or I could trip while using my walker.
Something else was
missing. My dogs weren’t here! For the past twenty-three years of my life, the
first thing I did every morning was exchange greetings with one or more
canines. It had been a constant in my ever-changing world. The kids might be at
their dad’s and the man in my life might vary – or not exist at all – but no
matter what else was going on, my day always began with my dogs. And they weren't here! It made me so sad, but it was my choice. When I got sick, my ex-husband, John,
had taken the dogs along with the kids, and he’d agreed to keep them even after I got home, until I
was stronger. They were sweet and loving creatures, but exuberant and large. My
yellow Lab was a hundred pounds of obsessive love and devotion, and my Labradoodle enjoyed
hopping up on his hind legs and hugging me. I couldn’t deal with that yet. I
was terrified of falling and paranoid about anyone or anything brushing up
against my surgical sites. I knew our reunion would be over-the-top, and it
wasn’t safe for me. The last thing I wanted to do was yell at them the first time I saw them.
I started to cry.
How pitiful was this? I was such a blob of pain and fear and helplessness that
I couldn’t even hug my own damn dogs.
This new life of
mine – my legless, dogless, and rugless life – began that first morning in the
dining room. It would be a life focused on the most basic of things, such as
personal grooming and hygiene, bandage changes, resting, trying to stay
hydrated, trying to eat, and enduring the visits of home health care nurses and
therapists. But more than anything, this new life of mine revolved around the
need for pain control.
I was on multiple
meds, but the big mama of them all was a skin patch stuck to my upper arm or
back. The small rectangle needed to be changed every three days so that it
could mainline the goods directly into my bloodstream twenty-four-seven. This shit
was one hundred times stronger than morphine. Really. I looked it up on
Wikipedia. But despite its potency, it
was merely the foundation for a whole slew of drugs. I took so much crap that I
needed a printed medication schedule to keep track, which I tucked inside the
Tupperware container holding all my prescriptions. (My kids referred to this as
my “snack bowl.”)
I was wasted out
of my skull the first couple months I was home.
Hey, I admit that my
college experience included guzzling cheap beer and/or the occasional opportunity
to inhale. But I wasn’t interested in the hard stuff. I never understood why
people wanted to untether themselves from reality and dissolve into a
psychedelic nothingness. I knew I would never do that to myself.
Ha. Never say
never. For a total of five months – three in the hospital and two at home – I
existed in a loopy la-la land, slogging my way through a pharmaceutical
fun house. The drugs turned me into a zombie. It was a Catch-22 of sorts, since I
needed drugs to endure the pain but the drugs made all of the new “real-life” challenges
I encountered at home a hundred times more difficult and dangerous.
I was stoned every
time I tried to safely get in and out of bed and in and out of my wheelchair. I
was stoned each time I hopped along on my walker. I had to use the bedside
commode and eventually teach myself how to use my new handicapped-accessible
bathroom facilities while stoned. The first time I took a shower, I was stoned
out of my mind and nearly fell. I had to do physical therapy exercises stoned. I
had to learn to operate the microwave, can opener, stove, and toaster oven
while stoned. I was stoned when I tried to dress myself, eat, drink, and carry
on conversations in person or on the phone. I was too stoned to write thank you
notes, let alone a paragraph for a novel. I was too stoned to read any of the books my friends
brought me, or figure out my medical bills, or remember the reason I had just wheeled
myself from one room to another.
It seemed there
were only four things I was good at while stoned: cat napping, watching TV,
listening to music, and staring at the fire. I discovered entertaining
television shows I never knew existed, such as Castle, The Mentalist,
and NCIS.
Seriously. I had never watched any of them, and I quickly got to the point
where I’d say this to anyone who happened to be nearby – “Shhhh. My show’s on.”
Naps were
essential because I didn’t sleep well at night in the dining room corner. I
kept waking up to the alien sound of the old radiator near the head of my bed.
I guess I was more accustomed to the steady stream of alarms, beeps, and “Code
Blue” announcements of the Shock Trauma Unit. Plus, I was either too hot or too
cold. And I couldn’t get comfortable. I had what doctors refer to as
“breakthrough” pain, meaning my narcotics cocktail couldn’t keep my nerve
endings from screaming, my chopped-off bone from aching, and my flesh from
throbbing and tingling.
I may have been
lonely for my own dogs, but somebody else’s pet had managed to turn my mornings
into a living hell. My neighbor’s pug dog, Mary Stewart, greeted each new day
with a specific routine. She would press her little blackened and schnarveled-up
face into the fence about ten feet from my dining room window, and let loose
with a staccato machine-gun firing of barks, always in the same five-beat rhythm
and always at the same brain-piercing pitch.
Aeurgh,
aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh!
Aeurgh,
aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh!
Aeurgh,
aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh!
Aeurgh,
aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh, aeurgh!
I may have
been stoned, but I wasn’t stoned enough to remain unaffected by Mary Stewart.
She drove me flippin’ insane.
Okay. So perhaps the
homely little dog wasn’t entirely to blame for my sleep deprivation. It was partly
my fault. I got cocky those first nights home and tried to sleep in a position
other than flat on my back, the way I’d spent most of the last three months of
my life. I propped myself up on my right side, a blanket shoved behind my back
and my surgery sites supported and protected by pillows. It felt exotic, and it
gave me a glimpse of how normal people sleep, but it wasn’t restful.
 |
| The dining room, before it became a sick room and dispensary |
My caring friend
Leslie came by to make me breakfast every morning, and I always asked for the
same thing – one hard boiled egg, one turkey sausage patty, an English muffin, and
cranberry juice over crushed ice. I would eat this in my comfy living room
chair every morning, a tea tray over my lap and my leg propped up, flipping the remote between Good Morning America and the Today
Show.
More days passed
and more stuff happened. Friends stopped by to help with laundry, run errands,
or keep me company for a bit. A group of volunteers designed a wheelchair ramp for
my back yard and began to bring in lumber and supplies. Another friend brought
me a pair of scissors, a kindness she began to regret as she watched me cut off
the lower left legs of all my jeans and sweat pants in an effort to create a sassy,
post-amputation wardrobe.
And after each day
passed, I would return to the little bed in the corner. I would be in that bed
by eight P.M., even if the kids were still up and making a racket in the
kitchen or watching TV in the living room. The noise didn’t bother me. Those
were the comforting and familiar sounds of my old life. The arguing and
laughing, the cabinets slamming, the bathroom plumbing swooshing – it was what
normalcy sounded like.
I would lie in my
corner retreat, staring at the warm burgundy wallpaper with its swirls and
filigrees. I’d cry quietly to myself, remembering how I’d carefully selected the
color and pattern for this room all those years before. Before.
When it was a dining room. Before it became a recovery room and dispensary. When
I was still me.
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