I liked the Rehab. Center, though I had to complain about it, of course. It was almost expected. I complained a little, and when I wasn't complaining, I was joking. My jokes were almost universally misunderstood because they were always said while out of context. Being out of context is the nature of a joke. I never knew how important context was to the spoken word until I tried to tell jokes. But it's very important. I tried spelling, I tried repeating myself, I tried spelling out loud, but nothing worked reliably. So I told the jokes to myself.
I had some practice at joking to myself. Right after my daughter was born, I contracted bronchitis and coughed every time I tried to speak, so I didn't speak. But it was nothing like the silence I had to get used to after the stroke. I could hear my voice in my head, hence it was always surprising when nothing came out. Even when I could speak, I was surprised by the sound of my voice. Gone were the days of sounding normal. I may not have felt the stroke, but I could certainly hear my voice come out in the flat, nasal, monotone of a stroke victim. I couldn't pretend I was on some grand vacation then, no matter how hard I tried. I'd had a stroke, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Though many people tried to make me feel better, I did have to grieve a little... or a lot. There was something my main doctor said once that I never forgot, something about always looking towards the future, or something along those lines. I agree with him to a certain extent. You do have to look ahead, but you also have to grieve what you have lost in the stroke, too. And that was what I was doing with the crying. I cried over everything, so I grieved over everything, too. I had lost so much: m y ability to drive, all my dreams of owning an old farmhouse someday, my job, my teaching career..., I even felt the guilt of being a bad mom... even of not going home when I thought I should. I had to grieve each one of them separately, and I did, as Don can attest.
When I wasn't grieving, in therapy, or having other fun, (ha, ha, ha) I spent my time fighting about home with Don. I know, that surprises everybody. Me, fight with Don? We always got along great, right? But it's true. We didn't fight very often, but we revisited the subject of 'home' more than once. Every Thursday, in fact. Don would come back, I'd say I was glad to see him, he'd tell me what he did in class, then some comment would bring us around to the dreaded subject of 'home.' The reason for the fight was that I wanted to go home and Don wanted me to have certain skills before I went home. In short, he wanted me to be able to go to the bathroom by myself. At first, this was impossible, and later, I wasn't well enough to be trusted to go by myself. I thought he was too lazy to take care of me and Ellie at the same time. I had taken care of Ellie, cleaned the house, and had a teaching career, so I knew what he was up against. But the truth was that Don is not me, and he's not as organized as I am. Plus, I didn't know how hard it would be. Don had an inkling, and he was right. Until the night I took myself to the bathroom. Just pulling up my tight jeans took an hour. I thought the fight was over. Boy, was I wrong! He simply came up with some other point of contention. Finally I realized that Don was scared to go home, and with good reason. It didn't matter what I could do and when I could do it. He just didn't want to go home. The Rehab. hospital settled the matter for us one day by discharging me and sending me home. The fight was over, and was I glad!
Yet Don was great, most of the time. He did all those things for me, and I knew that most spouses visited only on weekends. I was very grateful to have him around all the time. But this was the guy who once put the TV remote in the freezer. He might have been a wonderful genius, but he was still a genius, with all the personality quirks that go with it. He was very forgetful and absent minded, always leaving things where I couldn't reach them. His favorite place to put my book was under the Kleenex box, for instance, which meant I had to move two things instead of just one if I wanted to read. Not a big deal, but duh!
Then there were the 'itchies,' as I called the dandruff I had right before, during, and after the stroke. We used dandruff shampoo, but nothing seemed to cure it, and, boy, did it itch! My medicine was increased and made the left side of my head itch, too. The two together were almost overwhelming. The fact that they both made me itch the most when Don was gone (naturally!) didn't help matters any. I might itch my head against my pillow all evening (I couldn't reach me head with my arms yet), but there was just something about having someone else do the itching for me that was irresistible. That is, if Don remembered to tell the nurses, which he never did. Don itched when he was there, but that wasn't all the time. So I itched as best as I could, which wasn't very good. It proved to be great exercise for my arms, but I could have lived without that particular exercise!
And then there was the time I wheeled my wheelchair by myself for the first time. It took ninety minutes to wheel myself out into the hall. Making a wheelchair move was much harder than it looked! But I knew that pushing my own wheelchair was good for me. I pushed myself to meals after that unless a nurse brought my tray straight to me. It was hard, but I could do it if given enough time. Just to get about thirty feet down the hall took thirty minutes, and that was on a fast day!
Time was one thing I didn't have much of, it turned out. Things went by very quickly, too quickly for me. People were always talking too fast, options were given to me and taken away when I apparently made no decision, and choices were given too quickly for me to make a decision about them. That happened everywhere, with everyone, even with people whom I thought should know that stroke victims are just slower than normal people. I could never keep up. Even when I could talk and people asked me what I wanted to do on any particular day, I couldn't tell them because I couldn't talk fast enough. It took a long time just to take a breath. People always assumed I wanted to do nothing when I couldn't answer them in time, but that was the farthest thing from the truth.
And I coughed. I coughed all the time, even when I didn't have the three colds I caught while at the Rehabilitation Center. And when I coughed, my nose inevitably ran. It might not happen right away, but it happened sometime. I coughed when I concentrated, when I read, and when I just sat there, staring at the wall. It made such a mess sometimes. Just the thought of food was enough to make me cough, and not a single meal went by without a coughing spell. Lyndsay had a theory that I wasn't swallowing my own saliva fast enough, which was probably true, and I coughed on it constantly. All I had to do was concentrate on something, and soon I was off in a coughing spell. People were always worried that I was choking on something, but I only had a tickle in my throat that would not go away. So I coughed. And coughed. And coughed. I'm still coughing. Maybe this is something to do with the stroke? I don't know.
Except for itching, the fighting, and the coughing, the Rehab. Center was okay. At least I had coffee. The more I could move, the better it got. Still, I wanted to go home. Unknown to Don, I had set a goal for myself to see the third Harry Potter film at home. I made it by five days. I could move almost everything by then except my index fingers. (I discovered how much I'd used them when I read.) I could walk with the walker but had a wheelchair if I needed it, which was often the case. In fact, I walked out of the Rehab. hospital using the walker. It was a gimmick, since I couldn't walk far, even with a walker, but it was a nice gimmick. Yep, the Rehab. Center was okay.
Next: Tori