But I’m feeling better. I can look at a cookie and say, “away, demon!” I don’t scream curses at clock when it’s not the time I want it to be. And I still have musings. So let’s go.
Something really moving happened yesterday. H, one of my former patients, came for a visit. H is a little lady in her eighties who had a massive stroke. She was at our facility almost a year ago, and was one of my first patients to be so impaired. I remember vividly going in for my eval, attempting to sit her on the side of the bed, and having her fall immediately to her left. I was like, “holy crap, now what?!?” Not only did H lose all motion in her left leg and arm, she was what we call a “pusher,” someone whose body loses its sense of midline and compensates by “pushing” itself forcefully to the weaker side. As you can imagine, this is a huge challenge to overcome—how do you ever find your balance when your brain and body FEEL balanced when in fact you are literally falling over? For me, it was a huge learning experience: I learned a lot about therapeutic priorities (work on sitting up before finger movement, you goof), transferring and body mechanics (how do you move a 160 pound woman who can’t help and will actually be pushing AGAINST you?), and neuro-recovery in general.
Even if her treatment hadn’t been so seminal in my development as a therapist, I would remember H. She could be wickedly funny. She called one of the nursing techs The Yankee and told jokes that managed to be both ladylike and very dirty. She was also extremely emotional; one day we had to delay her session because she had started writing her own obituary and upset herself to the point that she was hysterically crying. She had a “gentleman friend” (“we’re too old for him to be a boy”) named J who was amazingly devoted. He would come to see her every morning and be waiting for her in the dining room so that everyday when she came out for breakfast she’d see him and have a reason to smile. She stayed in the facility for almost 3 months, longer than normal because we kept seeing glimmers of hope in her progress and kept finding reasons to keep her and wait for recovery. Unfortunately, she never made the “jump” we all hope for, and left us to go to a skilled nursing facility.
And yesterday she came back to visit.
It was bittersweet, in some ways. She is still in the facility, with no hope of living independently. Her arm is still paralyzed, and has begun to get the characteristic flexor tone of severe strokes, with her muscles tightening so that her fingers are starting to curl into a fist. It is such a pang to the heart, seeing the arm we worked on so diligently every day for two months still hang so limply. There has been no miracle of motor return, and to add insult to injury, J has been struggling too. A hip replacement surgery led to medical complications that nearly killed him, and he had to move into her new nursing facility as well.
But on the other hand, it was amazing. She came specifically so that she and her physical therapist could stand her up and walk her down the hallway, with her therapist supporting her at the waist and H using a hemi walker with her right hand. Her walk is slow and halting, but considering it took her almost the whole two months to stand without support, so steady and wonderful. My friend/fellow therapist and I both may have teared up a bit at that (and no, it wasn’t the BLARGH acting). And she is still so funny. We showed her how nearly every one of the therapists has a picture of her with them on their section of the office wall, including me, and she said we needed to find some new pinup girls. She told us that she and J are actually ROOMMATES at the new facility, and she likes to tell her friends that she’s living in sin with him.
(My coworker: I think God gives you a pass on the sin when you’re 86.
Me: Honestly, though, how much “sin” can a person with hemiplegia and a person with a new hip replacement get into?)
Most importantly, she just looked LOVELY. Her hair had been recently styled and curled, and she had on this fabulous brown velour sweatsuit. This is a woman who I’d helped on and off a bedpan, and who I’d bodily hauled up and down on the side of the bed so we could say she was a one-person assist for ADLs and buy a little more time from the insurance. And she looked so put-together, pretty, and happy. It was heartening, and uplifting, that she was surviving, and actually thriving.
I was tempted to say that seeing her was a nice little summary of what revisiting the past so often feels like. That the joy and fondness, tinged by the pang of regret and sadness, is the perfect example of what “going back” always brings. But that’s cheesy. So I’ll just say it was nice to see her.
In times of BLARGH, it's helpful to do things like yoga to clear your mind and center yourself. Here, the penguin babies demonstrated "Curl Up on the One Thing on the Floor" and the "Upward Facing Cat" poses, two of my favorites.
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