July 2, 2006

When I came into Gary’s room this (Sunday) morning, I found him leaned way over to the side in his chair. I thought he was doing a weight shift, but it turned out he’d dropped his grooming stuff and was trying to pick it up off the floor. He laughed and asked if I’d get it for him rather than have him get “practice” for a half hour at retrieving the stuff. I retrieved the comb and some other things from the floor. The chapstick, he informed me, he’d caught between his feet. His toothbrush had apparently gone AWOL. I looked all around the floor but couldn’t find it. He had the thought that maybe it had fallen between his feet, too. Sure enough, it was wedged farther down between his shoes. And even farther down, at the bottom of his foot plate, was his bar of soap. Gary started laughing. “I’m pretty good at catching things there, aren’t I?” he joshed.

That taken care of, I showed him the little “It’s been a tough day at Rehab” sign I’d made, in case we dared to put it on the garden sculpture. “Let’s go for it,” he said. The coast was clear in the garden, so I scotch-taped the 4"x4" sign to the bottom right-hand corner of the sculpture, thinking it wouldn’t draw too much attention to itself there. We made a quick get-away to the other side of the garden and checked out the various planters. One was full of herbs. A few of the herbs we didn’t recognize; we were able to identify the lavender only because of the sign next to it, but not all the plants had signs. And at least one sign was misplaced. We found the “oregano” sign in another planter next to something obviously not oregano, so I put that sign where it belonged. Gary then said since we’d now become graffiti artists, we might as well go further with our pranks and re-arrange the signs – for instance, putting the “donkey-tailed fern” sign on the elephant’s ear. I’m not sure if I should be worried about his new criminal tendencies ;-) (And no, we didn’t rearrange the signs.)

After hanging out in the garden a while, we went back to Gary’s room so he could eat his lunch as soon as they brought it, the urgency due to wanting to have a full hour of “pet therapy,” which was taking place from 12:30 to 1:30. We hadn’t been to pet therapy before and we were hoping to be able to pet some kitties. But when we found out the therapy was in the garden, we figured they probably hadn’t brought cats. Sure enough, the only pets were two dogs. Okay, they were cute, but they were dogs. We petted them for a while, and before leaving we told the therapists to bring cats next time. I’m not sure they’re going to listen to us ;-)

On our way back to Gary’s room, I told him I’d had a creepy thing happen to me last night. As I’d gotten into bed in my darkened room without my glasses on, I saw a tiny flash of light that must have been reflected off the mirror in the bathroom sink area. Worried it could be something electrical, I turned the light on and checked. Nothing. I took my glasses off, turned off the light, and got into bed again. The tiny light flashed up on the ceiling. Then again further along. Irrationally, this made me afraid (little devas in my room?). I turned the light on. And discovered a lightning bug on the ceiling. Gary got a good laugh at that.

He mentioned to me that they’d weighed him again, and he’s up to 128.9, which means he’s gained 3 pounds in a week. I told him I thought it all went to his arm muscles. He thought it was muscular weight too, as he hadn’t noticed any weight gain about his middle, which would probably be the only other possibility. He was happy to have gained the weight – I think he worried some when it kept slowly going down, probably due to continued muscle wasting in his legs.

In the afternoon Gary called his brother Donne to thank him for the gifts and to ask him how he knew “Main Currents in Marxism” was just the book Gary had always wanted. Gary said he is going to have to get a lot stronger to read it, however – the book is a huge hardback, about four inches thick.

During the course of their conversation I overheard Gary mention something I had wondered about. In writing in the blog about Friday, when I got to the part where I told about us volunteering to do the extra therapy session, it occurred to me that maybe *I* had been the one to volunteer Gary for the extra work, but I couldn’t remember. Turned out that was the case. Gary told Donne that one of the reasons the therapy had been so tiring on Friday was that when the OT had asked if we wanted to do that extra session, I had said “Sure,” before he himself could open his mouth, and he hadn’t felt like he could back out and say, no, he’d rather return to his room and browse the internet to rest up for his next session.

Oops.

Gary also talked to Donne about why he hadn’t felt confident about leaving here on the 14th. The main things he needs to get down before going home are doing transfers by himself and to be able to turn himself in bed during the night and get himself properly padded at the ankles. As far as transfers go, as of now he can’t do even the easiest transfer, the one from wheelchair to mat. And we haven’t yet solved the problem about what to do about padding between his ankles when he turns in bed from the prone position to the side position. We are going to make ankle pillows from foam, and if they don’t solve the problem, we’ll buy some waffle boots to try. And if they don’t work we’ll have to brainstorm for some other way to get a pillow down between his ankles or for some equivalent solution.

I talked to Donne while Gary went to do a weight shift (Donne blamed the choice of book on me, since I’d said Gary liked non-fiction; I thought that was a rather large leap). Donne mentioned that one of his in-laws had recently started reading my blog and had asked Donne if I was going to publish it in book form. I told Donne that other people have suggested I do that and that I would like to look into it after we return home and our lives become more settled. What I really need is for a publisher to stumble across the blog and say the same thing ;-), since I have no idea how to go about getting something like this published. Jamie of critique group has said we can discuss ideas for turning the blog into book form, if that’s what I want to do when I return to the group (hopefully I’ll rejoin you in about a month, Jamie). And I was recently sent an Amazon recommendation for a book about writing niche books – surely this would certainly qualify as a niche book – so maybe that would give me someplace to start.

Anyway, it’s great to hear that people have that reaction to the blog – I like to be read :-), just as I liked to have publishable results in math. Donne mentioned in our conversation that maybe it was a good thing I’d changed from math to writing. That change wasn’t exactly voluntary, as he knows, and getting into writing was not actually a conscious choice – I fell into the writing by accident a few years ago (thanks to discovering Remington Steele fanfiction ). But I am very glad I found something I can be as passionate about – I like to have passions. One advantage to doing math, however, was that I could check that my proofs were right by myself, just by going through the logical steps. I find it hard to know when my writing is “right” (i.e., “good”) – no checklist for me to go through ;-). So it’s great to hear that the blog is holding other people’s interest (or at least, that that is true so far ;-)).

Back to Sunday. Later in the afternoon my brother, Joe, came for a visit. Gary and I planned to take him to dinner at the Mexican restaurant, Casa Grande, a couple blocks away. This was to be our first outing on our own, and we figured it would be good thing to have someone like Joe along if we were going to attempt that particular restaurant: if the uphill traveling got to be too much for Gary, we could foist off any needed external pushing of his wheelchair on someone else besides me ;-). Joe was game (I hope he isn’t cursing us now that the excursion is over). The nurses prepared an IC (intermittent catheterization) kit for Gary to take, letting Gary off a little easier than his therapists probably would have. Then we took off on our adventure. We cut off one block of upwardly inclined traveling by using the underground tunnel going from Shepherd to a building up the street. But the trip still wasn’t easy. The sidewalks around here are practically obstacle courses – they’re broken, full of cracks and crevices, etc. Joe pointed out that even though Georgia is supposed to be a leading state in terms of the ADA, any benefit of the cutaway curbs on Peachtree is negated by the condition of the sidewalks along the street.

At the restaurant, we made things a little harder than they would have had to have been, as we didn’t see the ramp entrance until too late (it led from the parking lot in the rear). Consequently, Joe “backed” Gary up the couple of steps to the restaurant entrance, following a suggestion Gary had received from a rec therapist for what to do at a restaurant without a ramp. When we got to the door of the restaurant, Gary said he felt like the back of his chair was giving way and that he was going to fall out. He was right about the back of the chair. Fortunately my mechanically minded brother fixed it. Gary said he’d had a vague feeling a few days ago that the back felt different, slanting him too far forward. So we figured something had slipped out of place a few days ago, and when Joe had lifted the chair, that had been “the last straw” (or, “the next to the last” – thankfully, there was no big disaster).

We took a table, and the guys ordered their fajitas – I had forgotten to bring along the dinner I had purposely prepared ahead of time . After they ordered, next on the agenda was Gary’s IC (bladder program procedure) – Gary had to stay on schedule, so it couldn’t be delayed. Since he hadn’t done one in a public place before, and since he was going to do a slightly different routine than he had been using at Shepherd, I asked if he wanted to see if he and I could go in the handicapped stall in the women’s room. But Joe said he would accompany Gary in the men’s room.

So off they went, and about fifteen minutes later, they returned. I asked if things had gone okay. Gary said there’d been a few minor glitches, but basically things had gone fine. (It turned out he’d forgotten he could lay his transfer board across the toilet seat and use that as a shelf for his needed items, so instead he’d put the stuff on the back of the toilet seat, which wasn’t as convenient; also, since he normally uses a reusable bag for collecting the urine, he wasn’t familiar with the disposable kit bag, and he didn’t know how to empty it. So he rolled out of the stall with it on his lap, thankful that only Joe was in the room to see it, and threw the whole thing in the trash. We later learned that the kit bags can supposedly be torn open at the top and the urine emptied into the toilet, but the OT said that she herself had trouble doing that).

The guys dug into their food and thought it was excellent (the one problem with the dining experience at this place is that they play music too loud – which is why the Gruenhage clan hadn’t stayed there to eat after checking the place out). After Joe and Gary finished eating, I pulled out my credit card to pay for the food. I then had to have Gary and Joe tell me how to handle the bill (which of those slips of paper were mine to keep?). After I put down the tip, Gary commented to Joe that I hadn’t been out to a restaurant a long time. Evidently a 20% tip was too high.

We exited the restaurant, using the back ramp this time. We noted that we would first have to go down the long slope of the restaurant’s driveway, which exited onto busy Peachtree. “I can handle it,” Gary said. “Well, I’m not going to let you,” I replied, keeping my hands on his chair to act as brakes if necessary. That negotiated, we jounced along the sidewalk to Shepherd (well, Gary did most of the jouncing; Joe and I kept surreptitious hands on his wheelchair). Gary needed some help on some inclines, and on some cutaway curbs, and over some parts of the broken sidewalk, and Joe also gave him some extra breaks by pushing his chair when it wasn’t absolutely necessary (but gratefully accepted), but all in all we thought our trip a success. Rather than finish by going up an incline into the entrance of Shepherd, we went in through the garden gate. While there, we checked out the sculpture to see if our graffiti was still in place. It was. Joe laughed at it and said of the sculpture, “Definitely not a person who has been using a power chair.” He ranked our graffiti right up there with the “Who would Jesus bomb?” bumper sticker he’d seen on a van as he was driving into Atlanta. I’ll let you figure that one out yourselves ;-)

The van he’d seen, by the way, was one of the models that is used as an adaptive van (Toyota Sienna, I think it was). Joe looked through the catalog of vans that we’d been given, and in his opinion that particular one would be on the small side for Gary’s needs, having the same size interior as his own van, so he was a good judge. (We haven’t gotten far enogh along in the process to seriously be picking out a van, actually. At some point, Gary will have a class about vans.)

Joe stayed for about another hour after we got back to Gary’s room. We went through the mail he’d brought, talked more about the house, about his dogs. He explained that Dolores would unfortunately not be able to come to visit because one of their dogs has Addison’s disease and given that dog’s personality they are afraid the stress of both Joe and her being gone at the same time for even for a short visit would be very detrimental to their pet; Gary and I completely understand their devotion to their pet’s well-being, of course.

And speaking of pets, Gary and I asked about our cats. Joe told us we’d gotten a free bag of cat food from our vet – he’d walked into the vet clinic and told them he needed to buy some cat food for his sister and brother-in-law, and they immediately knew who he was and gave him the free bag (I’d guess the vet staff had heard of Gary’s accident through our neighbor who has been getting the cat food for us, and they probably figured Joe had to be my brother – of all of us in the family, I’d say he and I share the closest resemblance). Joe also told us Tigger had a tail-chasing problem, which set us all laughing, Gary and I knowing exactly what he meant. Joe said he was afraid Tigger would one day catch his tail and kill it. He said that the first time he’d caught Tigger at this activity, he’d had no idea what was going on. He was in another room and heard this horrible banging-against-the-walls noise. He investigated and found Tigger madly chasing his tail. This cat likes to do that while in a corner, evidently to make the most noise out of it. Or he’ll do it in the confined space under the microwave stand, again so he can hit as many walls as possible while doing it, apparently. I forgot to ask Joe if he’s caught Tigger scratching madly at the windows or at a mirror or on the bottom of the bathtub, other activities he’s been known to engage in. I don’t think Blackjack does that kind of scratching as much (and never chases his tail, being a very lazy cat), but for him, a closed door is an invitation to scratch. And scratch. And scratch. He can endure at that activity for far longer than any human can take it, another reason Joe doesn’t close his bedroom door at night – and another reason why our “cat barrier” was the door way out between the kitchen and living room areas and not the door between the living room and the bedroom areas.

During the course of the day’s conversations, Joe mentioned the math department people who’d been at our house to help this week: Jack Brown, who broiled in the Alabama heat, weed-whacking while Joe waved at him from a window in the air-conditioned house (this is how Joe put it, and of course, it is not literally true, as anyone who’s met Joe can attest to: while he hates the hot summers of the south, he is too busy working to idly stand by waving at someone else who is working); John Hinrichsen, an expert home builder himself, who helped Joe with “mudding” the bathrooms and contributed the use of his power washer (much to our cats’ dismay, as it is noisy), to be used to clean the bricks of our house and the surrounding concrete areas (patio, porch, and sidewalks, I believe); and Janet Rogers, who Joe says deserves the whirling dervish award, seemingly everywhere at once, pitching in at any task, painting all day without tiring, etc. Joe said at one point he went outside, figuring to help her with the power washer, but found her out there handling it like she was born to the job. (Good Lord, Janet, can I have some of your energy?).

Of course, I’m sure everyone who works with Joe holds his work capacity in similar awe. Jumping ahead, I got an email from Janet on Monday with pictorial updates of the work on our house, and she mentioned that Joe is, of course, the hardest-working person of all. She said she didn’t know what time he started or when he quit for the day, but he was always working, no matter when any of the rest of the people showed up. That is definitely Joe. We are so incredibly lucky to have him doing all this for us. We can’t thank him enough.

Right before Joe left us, I got him to take a few boxes of stuff from my car back with him – I’m still hoping to make enough room in the car that Gary and his wheelchair and his various paraphernalia can get in it, but don’t know yet if I’ve succeeded.

After saying goodbye to Joe, I went back to Gary’s room and helped stretch Gary. Then I did some personal care stuff, including changing his skin wound dressing. Then I got him properly positioned in bed. Norma called at one point, and Gary had a short conversation with her – she and his brothers and their families will be leaving for the Alaska cruise at the end of this week (yes, those Birmingham people had been a little over-optimistic that Gary would be ready for that cruise – even not taking into account the delay caused by the bed sore).

I was pooped by the end of the day. As I dragged my roller suitcase down the hall from Gary’s room to the elevators in the Shepherd building, I passed by the nurses’ station. A nurse stopped me and had me fill out a push pass form – evidently we were supposed to have filled part of it in when we left on our excursion and part of it when we returned, but no one had told us about these forms. After she and I had both signed it, she looked at me, obviously a little weary herself, and said, “Have a good weekend – I mean – ”

“Yeah, whatever,” I broke in. She and the other nurse at the station and I all laughed, knowing that she hadn’t said what she’d meant, since the weekend was essentially over (no doubt she’d meant to say “Fourth of July” holiday).

I got into the elevator and got out when it opened; another person stepped into it. I turned around to get back on the elevator, realizing it had opened on the second floor. “Oops,” I said, “I’m going down.” She stepped out of the elevator, saying, “Oops, I’m going up.”

Days can get long around here!