June 25, 2006

From an email sent to me:

> I'm curious, how do you
> cook these zukes?

LOL. That is usually the follow up question to "what are you going to do with all those zukes?"

I steam them, then puree them, so it's like a soup. That's about the only way to get down over two pounds of zukes a day ;-). (Fortunately, I really like them that way.)

Gary and I started our day together with stretches of Gary’s legs, then I put his net under him and got him ready for the hoyer. I mentioned to him I wasn’t sure if we were cleared to have put me in his chair with no supervision; he told me to go ahead and do it. So we may have broken the law again ;-), don’t tell. Fortunately Gary ended up in the chair and not dumped onto the floor ;-) (I have to put that little wink in there – otherwise I’m afraid his mom will read that and start to worry him ending up on the floor was at all likely.)

Lunch arrived a little while later. I think Gary will be awfully glad when he doesn’t have to put up with the cooking here. Chicken breasts are definitely not their forte, never failing to be dry and tough. He said the best thing about the one they served for his lunch was that it gave him practice balancing, because he needed two hands to saw away at it (sitting with both hands raised is a challenge; in fact, you probably recall that it is one of his therapy exercises. I didn’t push him while he tried to cut his meat, though – I’ll leave such dirty tricks to his therapists ;-)).

He had nothing scheduled for the day, and I wasn’t sure how we were going to fill the time – he was going to be up in his chair for six hours, and one thing I knew was it didn’t sound appealing to hang out in the same room he’s stuck in when he has to be in bed. Days ago we had talked about how he was going to get home when the time came, and I had said that I didn’t know how I would get him and his wheelchair in my car because the car was stuffed to the gills with things I had brought up from home or had acquired here in Atlanta or in Birmingham. With that it mind, I suggested we go out to the car and see if there was anything in it we could send back to our home with any visitors who came. So this became our project. First came the trip to the parking garage. This is where he’d gone for his push group (the group of one) and he showed me how he’d learned to open the heavy door by himself (the trick is to judge the path that the opening door will take and to be just outside that arc in order to get the chair inside it before the door starts to swing closed). He then took off down the ramp. I gave up running after him. When he stopped, I asked if I was supposed to keep up with him in case something happened. He said, no, there wasn’t anything I’d be able to do if the chair tipped over anyway. “Except to say, ‘uh-oh,’” I said. We laughed. He then went down the next ramp, and I told him that, actually, it looked like fun. He said it was, but that it wasn’t fun to go up it.

We sorted through the stuff and filled three small boxes with things that could be sent back. (I’m not sure that would give us enough room, but if not, Krystyna Kuperberg has already offered to help us get home.) One of the last boxes I grabbed to sort through was filled with all the stuff I’d salvaged from his wrecked car; for one thing, it contained all his material related to his now-cancelled Alaska cruise (“Alaska for Dummies,” among other things – do they have books for everything?). I had set the box down in front of him before realizing what it was, but thought he’d find it weird if I suddenly snatched that box back up. So I started handing him the stuff in it, as I had the stuff from the other boxes, so he could decide if there was anything in it he wanted to keep up here in Atlanta. I had wondered how he would feel about going through the box, but it didn’t noticeably affect him – I think it was much more disturbing for me, as it reminded me of the sight of his wrecked car.

We ended up with a few things to take back to his hospital room – the R.L. Moore biography, the DVD “Ghost World” (I have no idea what that is, but Gary said it looked fun), a Prairie Home Companion cassette. I started to stick the things in the backpack that is on the back of his chair. “Oh, sure,” he kidded me, “make your crippled husband carry the stuff.”

He decided not to show me how he could go up the parking ramp (Sunday is a day of rest, he declared), so we went to the parking garage elevators. That involved going up a small ramp, but it was pretty steep and his tip bars kept catching on it and it seemed harder than it should have been– probably another thing to ask his therapists what he should have done there.

Later in the afternoon he called his mom (she is having to cancel the cruise too, because of her broken arm, and Gary needed to tell her about the procedure for using the flight insurance he bought for them, so that she can get a refund of her ticket). I heard him tell her he was a little nervous about them discharging him from here in only three weeks – there was still so much to learn. But, he told her, he knew they wouldn’t discharge him if he wasn’t ready, and he’d still have two weeks of the transitional day program to attend after the hospital discharge. (We also plan to come back for another two-week session of day program later on, once he’s cleared to do the activities he is currently restricted from because of his flap. Once he’s cleared, he would be allowed to learn some of the more advanced skills. We’re hoping he’ll be cleared in time for him to come back here during the break after fall semester; otherwise we’d have to wait until next summer. Insurance probably won’t pay for the second session, and if they don’t, Shepherd told us the day program would cost $100 per day. It’ll be worth it.)

Gary also told his mom how great Joe has been to us, doing all this extra stuff we never expected – organizing yard clean-up and painting, etc. And he told his mom how all these math department people have volunteered their time and skills to help Joe – and therefore us – out. The response has truly been tremendous. We are so blessed.

(Oh, and the neighbors and Joe have been watering Gary’s pepper plants – Piotr brought up some peppers and Gary said they were great! In fact, I should mention again here that our neighbor Sylvia has been taking care of our mail and feeding our cats, and that other neighbors – the Rodgers, and I’m not sure who all else – have been taking care of mowing the lawn.)

The nursing staff occasionally checked in on us throughout the day to see how Gary was doing and if he needed anything, but they mostly left us to ourselves. We did pretty well on our own until after I had gotten him back in bed and had taken care of his skin wound, when we were trying to get him settled on his side. For some reason it took us quite some time to get him situated in a way he thought reasonably comfortable. But he told me upon my nightly return that he’d still kept slipping sideways. He thinks he figured out that it was because he didn’t use an extra pillow to help support his head in the way he normally had, but he wasn’t sure that was it. This is the kind of thing that makes me nervous, because I have visions of us going home and something similar happening, where we don’t know quite what to do to set things right. Thank God there are still these five weeks of practice.

At the end of the day, while we did his stretching, Gary remarked that today had almost been like being at home – we’d done a lot of his care ourselves, and the nurses hadn’t been around very much. True, we hadn’t had an active day, filling the time with little things (the things I already mentioned, plus talking to his roommate, being on the computers awhile – fighting over who got to use the ethernet cord to connect to the internet ;-) – etc.), but he thought it had been a very nice day.

I agreed.

I gave him a big fat hug and we said mushy stuff, and then I left.

All for now.