Who Said a Paralyzed Guy Can't go Hunting?

My husband Don, like many guys in his age bracket, learned to hunt on his family farm when he was barely old enough for his voice to change. Back then, he was hunting to help put food on the table and that time-honored tradition evolved into a life-long sport that he enjoyed until six and a half years ago when a stroke took that away at age fifty-nine.

Don had lived for his yearly hunting trips out to west where he often came home with more photos of wildlife than meat for the table. It didn’t matter. He was camping in the mountains, enjoying the company of good friends and loving the reconnection to the great outdoors. But that was in his pre-stroke days and Don---with his right side paralysis and severe aphasia---thought his hunting days were over. Fate had other plans. In September an acquaintance sent us a flyer about a great bunch of people who were in the process of organizing a deer hunt to re-introduce handicapped guys back into hunting. Don was ecstatic. They were members of the Flat River Chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation who had teamed up with Wheelin’ Sportsmen to sponsor this Michigan event.

The hunt weekend took place October 21st and 22nd but the fun started a month before when disabled men were invited to a shooting range for a sight-in day. Don took his 12 gauge shot gun and his 357 hand gun and the guys at the sportsmen club checked him out for safety and helped him figure out which gun was best for him to use. They had him try a variety of gun tripods, scopes, and rifle holders that could all be adapted for one-handed shooting. They also had him try a canvas blind with a bar at the window where he could rest his forearm as he shot with his 357 and, bingo, that was the right combination for Don. When they pulled the target down that he’d been shooting at from the blind, it proved that his marksmanship was more than competent, despite the fact that he’d never shot left-handed before. After that sight-in day, Don was so excited nothing could wipe the glow off his face.

The hunt days came and the organizing committee had thought of everything. There were gulf carts to hunt from for the guys who couldn’t transfer to hunting blinds. The blinds for the men who could transfer were set up and waiting at day-break. Each disabled guy was teamed up with an able-bodied volunteer who was not allowed to hunt. When one of the hunters harvested a deer a team of trackers was only a cell phone call away. Volunteers were also lined up to take the game to a processing place that gave a deep discount to disabled hunters. I’m still amazed at the number of man hours that were donated to make this free-of-charge hunt possible for wheelchair bound men like my husband.

I was able to join my husband on Saturday night when they had a deer camp-style get together that included a chow line for the hunters, their families and the volunteers. The food was all made with wild game and tasted fantastic. There was a campfire and “brag pole” outside and inside everyone swapped stories about their day’s adventure. The whole evening was filled with joyful faces and heartfelt laughter. Seventeen men had signed up to hunt Saturday, Sunday or on both days. Of those guys who hunted that first day, five where successful. My husband was not one of them but his day was none-the-less one of the best he’s had since his stroke.

Someone asked me if I was nervous letting my disabled husband go hunting and I can honestly say that I wasn’t. The volunteers at the sight-in day were so safety conscious and the hunt was so well planned that I knew he was in good hands. It would have been frosting on the cake had Don been one of the lucky hunters, but unlike the days when he hunted the family farm to help put food on the table, we don’t have a lot of mouths to feed and hunting, for Don, was never about the trophy. Hunting, for him, is about tradition and getting back to nature and I am grateful to the men, women and organizations that sponsored this event. They truly understand the deep-seeded place that hunting holds in the hearts of guys like my husband. The event not only gave Don several days of much needed male bonding, it also gave him back a piece of himself.

If anyone is interested in researching disability outdoor sports, start with the Wheelin’ Sportsmen, NWTF. http://www.wheelinsportsmen.org/wheelin/?SUBSITE=wheelin They are dedicated “to providing people with disabilities, including disabled hunters, disabled anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts, the opportunity to participate in outdoor activities.” An affordable membership includes a quarterly magazine.

My husband didn’t need any specialized equipment to go deer hunting, but I did find many interesting items on the internet that are made specifically for disabled hunters. There are units that attach to wheelchairs to support rifles, adaptive outdoor clothing to make it easier to dress a person with paralysis, accessible blinds, trigger activators, and all-terrain wheelchairs just to name a few. For the stroke survivor with the will to get back into outdoor sports, there is a way to turn that dream into a reality. Whoever said a paralyzed guy can’t go hunting was wrong.

Jean Riva ©

Sad Saturaday

Here it is four o’clock in the afternoon and I’ve worked myself up into a major depressed state of numbness. I should be cleaning house for our company coming on Monday. But I can’t seem to move. Don’s favorite brother and sister-in-law are coming over to show us pictures from their camera safari trip to Africa. Also coming is our niece and her mother, another sister-in-law who is ten older than me. Our sister-in-law is also a caregiver to our niece who has MS. It shouldn’t be that way, should it, an elderly mother having to care for a daughter who was once independent, married and full of life.

Don starts speech class in a few weeks and as I usually do I decided to keep track of all the speech he is able to get out without prompting in a day's time. Doing this today wiped out my previously good mood. Here it is late afternoon and I’ve counted only sixteen words! In the pre-stroke era Don would have said that many and more words in a quarter of a minute.While I was helping Don finish up his shower this morning I did notice a sign of progress (if you want to call it that and I do). He was doing things that he usually counts out---putting on deodorant and baby powder with a puff---and instead of counting to ten he was only counting to five. It’s such a small thing to the outside world, but not really in the brain healing business. So I grabbed on to that straw and I hold it near because the small things are all we’ve got.

When Don is in the shower one of the words that always come up is “handicapped.” I think he says it then because the shower ritual is where he needs the most help during the day. Today I said to him, “You could try to be politically correct and call yourself ‘disabled.’” That suggestion was meant with an emphatic “NO!” Don thinks of himself as handicapped and there won’t be any cleaned-up version in HIS life. Message received loud and clear.After shower time we loaded the dog in the Blazer and took him to the pet store where dogs are welcome to do their own shopping. We can only do that when the budget can afford to blow an extra twenty bucks. They put all the good smelling treats, flavored rawhides and expensive toys down low where the dogs can grab them. Cooper knows the drill. He shops the pet store like he’s in a contest to see who can get the most merchandize in a basket before the buzzer goes off. It’s like he’s got a calculator in his head or he can read the bills in my wallet. When he hits twenty bucks, he has this satisfied look on his face that says, “Man that was fun. Let’s go home now.”

After the pet store, we picked up a few groceries and some take-out food---we had lots of opportunities for Don to get out spontaneous speech. And yet it was only sixteen lousy words. One word was “sh#t” said when a teenager walked by the car. I still don’t know what sin she was guilty of. Maybe just being young, cocky and oblivious to looking in the direction of senior citizens was as enough to get the ‘sh#t’ score out of Don. After playing twenty-one questions I gave up trying to figure it out. This is my life. It’s gone from stimulating conversations to figuring out which of fifty different meanings Don’s aphasic brain hangs on a single word said in different tones, with different inflections.

Some of the other words Don spoke today were: “Pee” for the obvious reasons. “Yes/no” sung over and over again like a song. “Cooper,” “doggie,” “hey!” and as stated up above, the numbers one through five. It’s all so sad! How many hours have we spent doing speech homework over the past five and a half years? Hundreds? More like thousands. Why couldn’t Don’s aphasia have fallen in the category of transient aphasia? The Aphasia Association says that fifty percent of all people with aphasia do have transient (aka temporary) aphasia that will disappear quite quickly after a head injury. There is nothing transient about Don’s aphasia. My head has accepted that Don will never hold meaningful conversations again but my heart still mourns that loss from time to time. My heart still wants to get out of the mommy mobile once in a while and just be me again with a friend by my side instead of a responsibility. I just want to be Don and Jean again and not speech student and queue master.

We get the occasional signs that it could happen, that speech could come back, but every growth spurt is followed by a quiet time when words are as shy as made-up fairies playing on the dewy forest floors of Ireland. The words come. The words go, and after awhile you don’t know what is real and what is just your vivid imagination wanting to believe in a fairy tale where only good things happen.

Jean Riva ©

Goals and Ghoulish Things

There’s a kind of restlessness that goes with caregiving. Or maybe it’s not the caregiver life as much as the so-called retirement life that is so hard for me to get used to. We go along with no goals, no deadlines and a structure that revolves around the unseen forces of the mighty medical community’s appointment schedulers. We go weeks without anything on the books then our lives change and it’s like a pack of wolves is chasing us from one office to another to feed the blood labs, speech clinics and doctors with their quarterly follow ups. No matter how hard we try to spread them out, one or the other office is always canceling or moving us around on the schedule because---hey---“You’re the retired ones with nothing to do except get up each morning and check to see if your breathe still forms a film on the bathroom mirror.”

I miss the days when I had a reason to bounce out of bed. Hell, I miss the days when I COULD bounce out of bed. Now, I have to sit up on the edge of the bed, let the vertigo pass and hope it does before I pee my pants. Then I test my knees while leaning on the near by bookcase before I hobble ape-like with my knuckles creeping their way along the bed for balance until I get to the end where I grab a four-legged cane. I can’t stand up straight or walk without it in the mornings until my knees find their grooves and lock in for the day. When I’m in my Frankenstein gate, I toss the cane and I’m good to go.

I don’t know how much longer I can put off getting those joints replaced. But I have such a fear of that surgery! It’s so unnatural to think about having someone taking a power tool to your legs, cutting sections out and gluing moveable parts in their place that are only suppose to last 10-12 years---parts that have had at least 23,000 of them recalled. And I just know I’ll be one of those statistics they quote on people who have strokes during the surgery. It’s the medical disclaimer that says, “Now don’t worry if you stroke, its okay. My malpractice insurance won’t go up because I’m giving you this little disclaimer speech.” I also worry that I’ll be one of the people to get a couple of those recalled knee joints that were supposedly cleaned up and sent back out to use in other patients. Yes, they took them out of one set of unlucky dudes and gave them to another set of people, hoping they got the industrial oil slick off from the artificial joints this time. I won't even mention body fluids from who know where. Yuck! Never research medical recalls unless you want to scare yourself to death.

I swear I’m not turning into one of those old ladies who worry about everything from knee surgery to fly specks on the wall. Maybe if I got new glasses I’d find a few fly turds to get excited about, but I’m cool about the topic for now. I don’t worry just for the hell of it. I don’t worry, for example, that the refrigerator light isn’t going off when the door is shut the way it was designed to do. I don’t worry about dog kisses or germs in the sink that are big enough to have their own zip code. I am a worry-wart by nature---it was called being a trouble shooter in my pre-retirement/pre-caregiver days---but I’m still grounded a few points above the paranoid and pathetic. Thank you very much.

I guess it’s really true though. I DO need a hobby. This little woman needs to quit wandering through the house with a woo-is-me frown on my face because winter, my bad knees and my husband’s stroke are holding me prisoner. I need a hobby I can do in my gilded cage, I say with a sinister grin only women's libbers will understand. I’d take up the joy of cooking but that idea sucks like a two-head calf on an eight-tit udder. I could finish that quilt I started two years ago, but then I’d just have to start another. How many F-ing Jean creations does the world really need? I wish I knew what would make me happy besides raspberry truffles and a cleaning service! This is the only era of my life where I can remember being bored enough to contemplate stuffing marshmallows in between my toes just so I can get the dog to follow me around for a few hours.

Oh, boy, I just looked at the calendar. Don has a foot doctor appointment of Friday and we’re expecting a snow storm. The doctor’s office building has only one handicapped parking space and a lousy plow service so in the winter months I usually have to shovel Don’s wheelchair into the place. But that’s okay; he’s also located across the street from the candy shop that sells truffles and dark chocolate covered orange rinds. My life just took on new meaning; a have goal…I’ll live until Friday.

Jean Riva ©

Crazy Glue on my Shoes

Some times I hate listening to music. It makes me cry too often. I mean, who wouldn’t cry over lines like: “I can only give you love that lasts forever…” when your guy is sleeping in the other room and you’ve just finished watching The Way We Were?

I loved that movie when it first came out back in the early ‘70s. Plot: a Jewish left-wing intensely political woman falls in love with a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant who, by his own admission, had everything in life come too easy for him. I do believe it was that movie that made me fall in love with Robert Redford. (Insert a big sigh here.) Barbara Streisand as a movie star I can take or leave but the way she sang the theme song of that film still gets to me.

“…Memories may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget…”

We see bits of ourselves in most books or movies. After all, life-experiences are for the most part, timeless and universal. I was never as political as Barbara’s character, Katie, but I was certainly more political than the guys I dated back before I met Don. I was more into sociology and philosophy, too. I’m eternally grateful that none of those relationships ever worked out but, of course, being in my twenties I didn’t see it that way at the time. I would never have been happy serving beer and snacks to the boys in the living room every Sunday afternoon as they rallied their favor sports teams towards the play-offs. "Me man. You woman." I love that fact that with Don I was able to grow in a direction of my choosing.

“…So it's the laughter we will remember whenever we remember the way we were….”

I suppose some people will take offense at a caregiver who spends a lonely evening looking back over her life and wondering if she’d taken door number one or two instead of door number three would she be any more or less happy with the present day. But I don’t view reminiscing in a negative way. Maybe that’s a place we get to as we grow older. Maybe that’s a place we get to when we realize we didn’t turn out all that bad and we want to mark the trail for others to follow.

I look back at all the memories that Don and I made together over the years and I know why I view these caregiver/survivor years as just another chapter in a long book of chapters. We’ve done a lot of living and growing up together. Thumbing through our book of chapters is not about wishing for the past. It’s about loneliness that is often hard to bear. It’s about being two peas in a pod, half of a whole. Reminiscing is a reminder of why we caregivers choose to stay when others might run.

It bothers me when survivors misread the wistfulness that caregivers occasionally express about returning to pre-stroke days---when the survivor internalizes that wistfulness to be a condemnation of their post-stroke self. It’s not about measuring the past against the present for me. It’s about going back to the past to gather strength to go on in the future.

“…Memories light the corners of my mind. Misty water colored memories of the way we were...”

Memories are the commonalities that bind Don and me together, they make our commitment to one another stick like Crazy Glue on our shoes. This is my truth. I’m so sorry if instead of glue on your euphemistic shoe, you stepped in a big wade of snot.

Jean Riva ©

Elevators - Day 1,985

1,985 Days Out From the Stroke - When my brother was four-five years old, my mom took us downtown and during the course of our shopping trip the three of us got on a crowded elevator. My brother was never a shy or coy kid and when he had a question to ask he’d belted it out and that day, in between floors, he was curious. “Momma,” he said, honestly dismayed and pointing to another person on the elevator, “Why doesn’t that lady wash her face?” My mom was mortified but the black lady laughed. It was the 1940s and this anecdote speaks volumes about the times---that kid could be almost old enough for kindergarten before seeing his very first non-white person.

My second memorable elevator ride was in the Empire State Building---memorable because it was the setting for a full-blown panic attack. Not my first, but the worst one of my life. It was in the 1950s, a time when I was in love with art deco architecture and I had been looking forward to this trip to the public observatory at the top. Unfortunately, once I got there I found out that I had no more love of heights than I did for being locked inside a “windowless box” grinding and groaning its way to the top of that beautiful building. Twenty-five years later, when Don and I were in Chicago about to get on the elevator at the Sears Tower, I could feel another major panic attack coming on so I made an excuse and refused to get in. My ancestor, Elisha Otis, founder of the Otis Elevator Company, was probably rolling over in his grave over my behavior. But Don had a different reaction. That elevator had gotten stuck between floors and it took a half hour to free him from inside. He got off it in awe of me, thinking that I was clairvoyant. I never corrected that misimpression. We were newly in love and I wasn’t about to start punching gems out of my princess crown.

The most recent unforgettable elevator ride in our lives happened on the 30th day after Don’s stroke…… so I'll continue here with my documentation of his first 101 days.


Day 26 out: The social worker gave us three names of sub-acute nursing homes that have openings where Don could go. One place was the facility he’d just been in and one of the other places I toured this morning, but it was totally acceptable. So we took a tour of the third place this afternoon and we were all impressed by the cleanliness and therapy rooms. But the roller coaster we’ve been on since Don’s stroke crashed when, at the end of the tour, the woman told us that they won’t accept Don’s Blue Cross, Blue Shield. It seems they are having some sort of dispute over their contracts so they’re sitting there with half their beds empty waiting for Blue Cross to give in. I offered to private pay the difference between what The Blues would pay and what they wanted but she was firm and it seemed to me, she was somewhat smug about the whole thing. She told us to complain to insurance company and tell them their two dollars a day dispute was keeping us out of a good facility! We were so upset that she let us go through the tour and built up our hopes then laid that bomb on us.

Day 27: Don stayed awake for a very long time today and he even sat in a chair for an hour.

Day 28: Don had another good day. His color was good, his mood was good and best of all when I drilled him with “homework” he actually said a couple of vowels and letters parrot style after I'd say them.

Day 29: Don’s mood was still good and he seemed to understand most of the stuff I threw at him today. He didn’t do quite as good on comprehension and pointing to picture symbols as he did yesterday but I added eight new pictures so maybe that was too many to add at one time.

Day 30: In keeping with the comedy of errors that Don has endured over the past month, when the ambulance-cab came to transfer Don to the nursing home, the driver didn’t get Don’s wheelchair far enough into the elevator and the door shut on his toes. The elevator car moved down several feet before the driver realized what she’d done and pushed the emergency stop button. Then it took awhile for us to get Don’s toes uncaught from the rubber door seals because the door button wouldn’t open it up between floors. Once out of the elevator, we were all shook up and the driver was so flustered that she wanted to take Don to ER before we even got out of the hospital. One of nurses who knew Don from his floor happened to walk by about then and she checked his toes out and she convinced the ambu-cab driver that it would do Don more harm than good to sit in ER. At that point, Don vomited half his lunch up. The other half came up on during the ride back to the sub-acute nursing home. Everyone there seemed to be hiding after we got him checked into his room, so I ended up cleaning him up myself. He slept the rest of the day.

Day 31: All and all today went pretty good for Don. The occupational and physical therapists were both here and got Don into a chair using a slide board. He was able to understand and help out. He also sat up at the side of the bed, balancing a little better than before. The new speech therapist has him in a class for eating at noon time and she tried him on soft-solids, but she’s going back to puréed again. She also said that since Don is stuck on the word “yes”---his only word---we’re not supposed to let him get locked in on it anymore than he is already. I have to phrase questions to him that need a “no” answer, then sharply correct him when he answers, “yes.” Like: “Are you a woman?” “Is your name Paul?” Toilet training starts tomorrow! I’m not sure I even want to know the details of how that works.

Jean Riva ©

Halloween - 1,983 Days Out

Don is outside at the end of our sidewalk all bundled up in his Woolrich coat and wearing his Stetson cowboy hat, a canvas bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups tied to his wheelchair. He’s waiting for the ghosts, gremlins, pirates and princess’s to come begging for candy. He’s having the time of his life. Until recent years, he’d always worked nights and never got to experience this ritual of fall. Imagine that, being over fifty years old before handing out your first Halloween treats. He knows most of the kids from his ‘trolling for friends’ rides in his electric wheelchair during the summer months.

I’ve been trying to locate a garden’s doorbell that I once saw in a catalog and didn’t have the brains to order it right there and then. The part that rings has a belt clip so you could wear it and the part you press to ring would have been ideal to hook up to Don’s wheelchair. That way, I’d always be at his beck and call, as long as I didn’t get more than 500 feet away. It would come in handy for times like tonight, if Don needs his candy supply replenished or when we’re in the grocery store and his Starbuck debit card is over-drawn. It would have come in handy this morning when he was in the bathroom and he accidentally spilled his urinal on the floor. Again.

Last night I typed up all my notes from the book that I had kept in Don’s room in the first 101 days after his stroke. I asked him if he wanted to read them and he does. I’m thinking it might help him be less complacent about doing his arm and leg exercises when he sees it in black and white how hard-earned it was for him to be able to stand up and make transfers, etc. The notes don’t include improvements he’s made in speech and cognitive issues since the stroke because most of them didn’t even begin until he got into out-patient therapy, after his first 101 days.


Day 23: Hospital. The breakfast tray came up with all regular liquids. No one seems to get the thickened liquids order right! The cardiologist was in this morning and he’s going to wait a couple of days to do the jump start (cardio inversion) on Don’s heart. He’s known Don a long time and he said he’d try to pull a few strings with the social workers here and try to get Don back into the rehabilitation hospital, instead of having to go back to the sub-acute nursing home. He didn’t believe the ‘vegetable for life’ prognosis either. Don had a rough day. They did an echogram, blood work, and the physical therapist was here to do some bedside range of motion stuff. Hospital staff was in and out of his room all day and they seemed to wear Don out. One of those people was a rehabilitation specialist and he told me that Don “can’t make the grade” to go back to rehab. That was a royal let down but not a complete surprise. I asked him what exactly Don would have to be able to do to make the grade. He said: 1) He’d have to be able to follow two-step directions; 2) He’d have to be able to weight bear on one leg; and, 3) He’d have to have some place to go after rehab where he won’t be living alone. At least now I feel like we’ve got some marching orders.

Day 24: Nothing new.

Day 25: The cardio inversion worked! Don’s heart rhythm is back were it belongs but what a stressful procedure that turned out to be. First, his own cardiologist had emergency surgery so they gave us someone new. He told us it would only take ten minutes but it ended up being almost two hours. Earlier in the day they had Don hooked up the heart monitor and something was going on that caused nurses to come running in and about to call a Code Blue. This happened several times over the morning so I was anxious the procedure, afraid he’d die before they got to it. Then when they got the machine in the room that was suppose to do the inversion, it wasn’t acting predictable so they called a computer specialist in. He fiddled around and finally called an electrical maintenance man in and it was determined that a wall receptacle was causing all the trouble. They wouldn’t let me stay in the room during all this so I was eavesdropping outside the door the whole time. The next thing that happened was they had the maintenance man hold the machine’s plug in the wall while the doctor let a nurse hold the paddles used to jump start Don’s heart! “She always wanted to do it,” she had told the doctor. I’m still shocked that he actually allowed her to do it.

Jean Riva ©

Day 1,982 Out from Don's Stroke

We went to a near-by little town today with the intention of getting groceries, but I didn’t feel like fighting the Saturday afternoon crowd---Don slept in this morning---so we changed horses in the middle of the stream and we stopped for dinner at the oriental restaurant, got gas and a car wash. Then, at $2.38 a gallon for gas, we spent an hour running the country roads around Don’s old stomping grounds. These Saturday trips into town always result in Don getting out more speech because he tries to tell me stories as we pass by the various houses of his youth. He was a paper boy in this tiny town with eighty people on his route and if it wasn’t for his aphasia, I’ll bet he could still name them all. He’s got the proverbial memory like an elephant.

I found a notebook this afternoon that I’d kept in Don’s room at the sub-acute nursing home where he was transferred after his stroke. The first entry was made on June 8th, 2000, on the 18th day out from the stroke and it went like this: Don was moved here today around noon from the rehabilitation hospital which was very depressing for both of us. Tomorrow they’ll evaluate him, so not much is happening today or tomorrow. Twice they brought water in for Don to sip, which he can’t have. His liquids all need to be thickened or he’ll chock and aspirate them into his lungs. Dinner didn’t go well either. They tried to serve him a hot dog and grapes, which is a far cry from the puréed foods he was getting at the rehab hospital. He ended up with no dinner at all.

Day 19: The head nurse says it will be Tuesday---5 days away---before all the people involved have evaluated Don and turned their reports in to the social worker and before we’ll be able to talk to the doctor in charge of his case. He could starve to death before Tuesday! All the food trays came to his room wrong again today, with stuff he can’t possibly eat without chocking.

Day 20: Today turned out to be a comedy of errors---if the errors hadn’t been so serious, depleting Don’s energy and endurance! Around noon they ordered an ambulance to take Don to the hospital for a cardio inversion. His heart is out of rhythm and racing so badly that he looks as if he’s been running marathons. When they picked him up someone had put down on the transfer papers that Don could talk---which, of course, he can’t---so when the ambulance people couldn’t get any words out of him they thought he was having stroke right there and then and they changed his destination, taking him to another hospital that specializes in neurology. In the meantime, I, Don’s brother and his cardiologist were waiting and waiting for the ambulance to come to the right hospital. Don, upon arriving at the other hospital, was put through a bunch of test he didn’t need. (Why didn’t he get that kind of service twenty days ago instead of letting him lay in emergency for hours without doing a thing but "observe"?!) When we finally located the missing Don via a bunch of phone calls, Roger and I went racing over to the other hospital to straighten the mess out and to get Don over to where he needed to be. However, their ER personal preferred to believe that erroneous check mark on the transfer papers instead of us when we told them that Don hadn’t spoken a single word since the stroke twenty days ago. By the time we got it all sorted out and got him transferred, almost five hours had passed and Don’s heart doctor had left for the weekend. So Don got parked in a room to wait until Monday.

Day 21: Today was blissfully peaceful. We discouraged all visitors so that Don could get a much needed rest. He doesn’t even have a roommate!

Day 22: They’ve got good nurses at this hospital. One of them got Don an outside catheter so that he doesn’t have to wear diapers. He’s being pumped full of fluids because he was so dehydrated from not getting enough thickened liquids down. His heart rate is slowing down a little bit but the rhythm is still wacky. His blood pressure is too low and that is being addressed. Don sat up in bed for several hours, awake and alert this afternoon. We played tic-tac-toe on a dry wipe board and he won! I still can’t---won’t--- accept the rehab hospital’s prognosis. “Vegetables” can’t play tic-tac-toe!

Jean Riva ©