Post Stroke Mumblings — Part 8
The Stroke Ward — 2
My first couple of days in the Stroke Ward were interesting. I was able to move around a bit more, actually able to sit on the end of the bed with my legs hanging down.
I got to meet my next-door neighbor, Cindy, and my roommate, Doreen, and also her family, who were visiting. They came from the East Coast of Canada, Prince Edward Island, and, like many folks from that area, were super friendly.
Doreen, poor lady, was totally bedbound, with no ability to move her left side as a result of her stroke. She had to be lifted out of bed and into a wheelchair with a special hoist. Unfortunately, she was also going through some personal trauma with an abusive roommate and while she hated being in the hospital, going back to her own place would have been much worse. She completely lacked motivation to do her exercises to try to regain some mobility.
Her nieces were in every day and trying to cheer her up. They were hoping to persuade Doreen to go back to PEI and stay with one of them.
Doreen might have been elderly and helpless, but her mind was as right as rain. She was determined not to go back to PEI. She told me she spent her youth trying to leave there, and once she qualified as a teacher, she immediately left to live and work in Toronto. No way was she going back now, even if it meant going to an old age home.
I found this worrying. The situation with our old age and nursing homes is not great, and for someone in her condition, who is helpless, it might be pretty awful. If she went to stay with her niece in PEI she would be in the care of loving relatives, in a home rather than an institution, and not at the mercy of random uncaring personnel.
Feisty Doreen was not having any of it. She wanted to remain in Toronto come Hell or Highwater!
I would remind her to do her hand and leg exercises, she would growl at me, while laughing at the same time.
Seeing what was happening to Doreen was a frightening reminder to me of how vulnerable we are once we are helpless. It made me all the more determined to work at becoming mobile again.
Thank you, Doreen, for giving me extra motivation to get moving.
Just for interest sake, below is an actual photo of said room. That is probably a reflection of me in the mirror!
The rehab room was directly opposite our room, and I wanted very much to get into that room and get using their nice exercise equipment. This had not been mandated at that point, but I was forever staring longingly across the hall while sitting on the end of my bed and doing hand exercises with tennis balls and Theraband tubes that Bruce had brought me from home.
It was as a result of sitting on the end of the bed that I managed to fall off as shown in the first picture. I was wriggling around, trying to get a better position, and the top covers began to slide. I stupidly grabbed the covers rather than the bars at the end of the bed and slowly and gracefully slid off the bed and landed on the floor with the bed covers all over me.
Naturally, I found this hilarious. Meantime, my neighbour Cindy, in the next room, spotted me through the gaping curtain between the rooms, and Doreen’s niece, Donna, spotted me through Doreen’s curtains, and everyone rang for the nurse, and Donna (a retired nurse)rushed over to try to get me up. This simply made me laugh harder, which is how the alarmed nurses found me, on the floor, under a pile of bedclothes, laughing incoherently.
To their credit, they were super worried about the fall, thinking that I might have hurt myself. They actually dragged an available doctor to see me and double check my “condition”. I was fine, just felt really silly.
Reminder room layout below.
Next episode: Adventures in Rehab
