I Love Chair

Don't you stick that knife in your leg Rickie Bobbie

—Lucius Washingon, Talledega Nights

Hallelujah, I have a wheelchair. It still requires blinding pain to get into it, but I now have a way out of the ZA with sufficient warning time to prepare. I'm on the 5th floor which would require use of the elevator…perhaps the only thing giving me that much time would be a tsunami…and maybe I don't want to leave the fifth floor anyway. Take my chances with the flood waters.

My friend came up to sit with me last night. We played Yahtzee. She brought me Five Guys; I didn't blow them… the hamburger with cheese and grilled onions was a good one.  I only mention her presence because she immediately opted for burning alive.  She said you're going to pass out and die from smoke inhalation before you feel fiery flames of fire…that's a very good point…I hope that's true. I'll be breathing deeply as I wait for the elevator. 

But at least I have a fighting chance, right? Isn't that what it's all about? Rather than being trapped and helpless…just give me a shot at an escape. If I possess the right stuff, I'll make it. Only to be drowned by the flood waters as I roll my chair out into the parking lot. I should stop watching Final Destination. 

Rehab is in full swing…and I can tell you it is wonderful to be in a professional facility. Things actually happen that are supposed to happen.  I received 1 hour of OT and 2 hours of PT yesterday.  PT cleared me for rambling around the floor and building.  She turned my bracelet from yellow to green. “Lord I was born a rambling man, trying to make a living and doing the best I can.” After being in Folsom for a week, it’s the simple things.  I am no longer singing the blues.

So what does full swing rehab mean?  Apparently, they visited all night, and I didn’t wake up.  They even took some blood.  I suppose I said yes…but I didn't remember.  I confess it's a weird feeling in the morning…to see a needle location.  It was already in MyChart.  Blood draw, 4:32 am.  CBC testing, and the results were already there as well.  Professional.  I can tell you I was thinking about eels when I saw the unwitting blood draw…but that's another issue altogether.

Let’s get back to the wheelchair.  My association with it has become one of love/hate affairs.  I know how to get into it…and it represents freedom from the bed, in a big way.  Just to move through a door, and to roll down the hall, is significantly more freedom than I had at Folsom.  Why didn’t they offer me a wheelchair?  It’s mysterious to say the least.  The hate part of the chair is it doesn’t track straight.  Roll both wheels at the time and it pulls to the right.   I have to keep correcting it…over time, I bet I’ll get used to that little pull to the right and will make this chair my own.  I will miss the pull to the right in any other chair. I love chair.  

The big thoughts today are, how long will I be in this chair that I love? I’m so attached to it…even though it's old and rickety. I’m sitting in it now as I write, getting attached more and more.  

If I get really good maneuvering this chair, am I really just learning to use it so I can do all of this at home. Will I be modifying the house with wheelchair ramps and other handicap requirements just to live at home?  I know I’d rather be at home.  I think about the last few years of my dad’s life…most of his mobility was gone, and he was in a wheelchair.  We take for granted the simple things, like going to the kitchen to get a beer, getting up to return the beer, we only lease it.  Getting up to simply look out the window.  Did I let my dad look out the window enough? Probably not.  But on a series of nice summer days, we would sit out on the porch.  On one particularly nice day we sat on the porch endlessly. We sat there, for hours and hours.  Until it got dark.  He never complained, he never stopped doing what he was doing…which was sitting on the porch, listening to the bird calls, feeling the breeze of a perfect day beneath the trees, and looking out into life.  For six days in Folsom I laid in a 12 x 12 stall, waiting for relief from the blinding pain in my leg.  The contrast is stark and disturbing.

That might be the closest I will ever come to feeling incarcerated.... It's possible I was incarcerated but just haven't woken up to that reality.  I had not looked out a window since I arrived on Sunday afternoon.  In fact, the ambulance had no windows so I'm not even sure what building I was taken into.  It wasn’t long until the ER doctor seemingly decided my fate.  She sent me to the Observation Unit.  It took me until Thursday to finally contact patient relations and ask for advocacy. Most of the emotional trauma I was feeling was in full flight.  This on top of the obvious physical problem I was grappling with.  The garage spaces of the observation unit are more like the surgical observation rooms outside the OR. They are meant to observe a patient following surgery for an hour or two, until they return to their hospital room or they are released.   They're like garage spaces... With curtains across the 12 ft opening.  No doors, no bathrooms.  I literally bathed myself in the sink this morning.  Zero privacy of any kind. Because I couldn't walk and I didn’t have access to a wheelchair, I never left that 12 x 12 cubicle for 6 days.  I haven’t even looked down a hall…all I could see was the half open curtain in front of me, the bottle in front of me, for piss, and the lights from the hall.  At 7 pm they shut those lights off.  At 7 pm they turned those lights back on.  They brought a commode to the room for me to take a shit.  Visitors were in the hall; others came into the stall.   People just walked right in while I'm sitting there in my hospital gown pinching a loaf.  Then the standoff…who was going to clean it up…was it going to be the nurse in charge of my stall, or the tech in charge of my stall.  In one instance the remains of my work stayed uncleaned for most of the day and well into the night.  Almost 12 hours had elapsed from the time I dropped the deux until the technician on duty decided it was her job and she ought to clean it up.   I had already begun to think I was incarcerated in a third world medical system with fancy fixtures, but this actually cinched it.

>Forget the ZA, forget a tsunami, forget a fire. Those at least lead somewhere. I was in limbo, in purgatory, in prison, I awaited my fate being decided by surgeons and administrators I would never meet.  And currently I could never leave. I’ve asked patient relations the how and why question.  I’m curious if they will even answer.  My question to them is as bizarre as they come.

Hello, I am completely confused by everything that happened during the week I was incarcerated in your Adult Observation unit and I believe I am owed an explanation for each and every decision that was made on my behalf during the entire week starting from when I entered the ER, until I left the ER and entered the Observational Unit and then subsequently taken by transportation to the Inova Rehabilitation Center at Mt Vernon, under threat of security intervention. WFT?

Did I mention I love my wheelchair?