Thursday, February 23, 2006
Two days before the wedding
It's two days before my wedding, I'm still fighting nausea, and there's an awful lot of backstory to cover.
I discovered in the hospital that you can't depend on the caregivers to necessarily give the best care, whatever their intentions. It is vitally important to keep track of your own treatment and to speak up if something doesn't seem right.
Unfortunately, many of the things that don't seem right are just a natural result of being ill or damaged. I started suffering ungodly muscle spasms, particularly at night. You know how when you fall asleep, sometimes your body does that all-over jerk that feels like you've just fallen from mid-air? Or sometimes it feels like electricity, or like all of your muscles just have to tighten all at once. It's involuntary, and usually harmless, but with my hip fracture, it was unbearably painful.
I also had a huge amount of nausea, which seemed to be made worse by anxiety. Every time the attending doctor and his little doctorlets came by, I felt ill. When my mom wanted to talk about wedding invitations--what kind of print, wording, whether to say "the parents of" or have them be from Brian and me--I felt queasy. When anybody talked about possible discharge from the hospital, I became ill. Where was I going to go? I couldn't imagine going back to the second-story apartment in Westland. But what else could I do? Brian began searching for other apartments, and looking at options also made me feel queasy.
At this point, I began physical therapy. I was on some level glad to be getting out of that torturous hospital device they call a "bed" and beginning the process of becoming something that wasn't an immobile lump of protoplasm, although actually having to do it was painful, difficult, tiring, and also caused nausea. Sitting up for long was difficult at first, but at least I did know--from previous experience--that it would pass and that getting up and moving around would ultimately be good for me. The physical therapist would show up, bring a walker, and have me try to get out of bed and move around. First it was three feet away from the bed and back. Then it was to the door and back. Then it was through the door, across the hall and back. Each time my jaunts got successively longer, and she recommended--as an alternative to going home or going into an "assistive care facility" (read: "nursing home")--that I be admitted to the intensive rehabilitation unit on the same floor of the hospital. I would do physical and occupational therapy twice a day.
So I moved to the room where I would spend my Christmas.
On my first day of occupational therapy, I was measured for compression stockings and given a set of adaptive equipment of the kind they gave to Grandma when she had her hip injury several years ago. I too got the sock put-er on-er, the grippy thing, the giant shoe horn, the pants hook. I'm not sure if Grandma also got the leg loop (it looks like one of those "invisible dog" leashes) or not; I found mine to be incredibly helpful for moving my legs onto and off of the bed.
Physical therapy consisted of walking for longer and longer distances using the walker (but putting no weight on the right foot), doing leg exercises on the mat, and occasionally doing arm strengthening using the pulleys or fulcrum weights. They also taught skills like stepping up onto a curb using a walker, sitting down in a car seat from either a wheelchair or a walker, and using a crutch to go up and down stairs.
I had too much anxiety to do the stairs. I was just too worried about my hips crumpling like phyllo pastry, and the therapists didn't press me.
Occupational therapy consisted of getting me dressed and showered in the mornings, and in the afternoon doing a combination of eye-hand coordination activities, some arm strengthening activities, and some arts and crafts. I saw people making these rubber mats with the Michigan M and when offered the tubs of colored rubber tiles, decided I would try to get creative and make an aquatic scene. The therapist was getting visibly impatient with me (she wanted to clear space off the counter) and I couldn't spend as much time planning my picture as I wanted, so I had to do a fairly rudimentary scene with two fish, gravel, some plants, and two different colors of blue to indicate the depth of the water.
Nobody told me it was going to be a doormat. If I'd known, as I told one of the substitute therapists on the Christmas break, I would have planned the picture to be horizontally aligned...as it was, they must have thought I was either mentally deranged or just really careless.
The other therapist turned it sideways the way I had planned it. "Oh hey, that's actually pretty cute!"
I discovered in the hospital that you can't depend on the caregivers to necessarily give the best care, whatever their intentions. It is vitally important to keep track of your own treatment and to speak up if something doesn't seem right.
Unfortunately, many of the things that don't seem right are just a natural result of being ill or damaged. I started suffering ungodly muscle spasms, particularly at night. You know how when you fall asleep, sometimes your body does that all-over jerk that feels like you've just fallen from mid-air? Or sometimes it feels like electricity, or like all of your muscles just have to tighten all at once. It's involuntary, and usually harmless, but with my hip fracture, it was unbearably painful.
I also had a huge amount of nausea, which seemed to be made worse by anxiety. Every time the attending doctor and his little doctorlets came by, I felt ill. When my mom wanted to talk about wedding invitations--what kind of print, wording, whether to say "the parents of" or have them be from Brian and me--I felt queasy. When anybody talked about possible discharge from the hospital, I became ill. Where was I going to go? I couldn't imagine going back to the second-story apartment in Westland. But what else could I do? Brian began searching for other apartments, and looking at options also made me feel queasy.
At this point, I began physical therapy. I was on some level glad to be getting out of that torturous hospital device they call a "bed" and beginning the process of becoming something that wasn't an immobile lump of protoplasm, although actually having to do it was painful, difficult, tiring, and also caused nausea. Sitting up for long was difficult at first, but at least I did know--from previous experience--that it would pass and that getting up and moving around would ultimately be good for me. The physical therapist would show up, bring a walker, and have me try to get out of bed and move around. First it was three feet away from the bed and back. Then it was to the door and back. Then it was through the door, across the hall and back. Each time my jaunts got successively longer, and she recommended--as an alternative to going home or going into an "assistive care facility" (read: "nursing home")--that I be admitted to the intensive rehabilitation unit on the same floor of the hospital. I would do physical and occupational therapy twice a day.
So I moved to the room where I would spend my Christmas.
On my first day of occupational therapy, I was measured for compression stockings and given a set of adaptive equipment of the kind they gave to Grandma when she had her hip injury several years ago. I too got the sock put-er on-er, the grippy thing, the giant shoe horn, the pants hook. I'm not sure if Grandma also got the leg loop (it looks like one of those "invisible dog" leashes) or not; I found mine to be incredibly helpful for moving my legs onto and off of the bed.
Physical therapy consisted of walking for longer and longer distances using the walker (but putting no weight on the right foot), doing leg exercises on the mat, and occasionally doing arm strengthening using the pulleys or fulcrum weights. They also taught skills like stepping up onto a curb using a walker, sitting down in a car seat from either a wheelchair or a walker, and using a crutch to go up and down stairs.
I had too much anxiety to do the stairs. I was just too worried about my hips crumpling like phyllo pastry, and the therapists didn't press me.
Occupational therapy consisted of getting me dressed and showered in the mornings, and in the afternoon doing a combination of eye-hand coordination activities, some arm strengthening activities, and some arts and crafts. I saw people making these rubber mats with the Michigan M and when offered the tubs of colored rubber tiles, decided I would try to get creative and make an aquatic scene. The therapist was getting visibly impatient with me (she wanted to clear space off the counter) and I couldn't spend as much time planning my picture as I wanted, so I had to do a fairly rudimentary scene with two fish, gravel, some plants, and two different colors of blue to indicate the depth of the water.
Nobody told me it was going to be a doormat. If I'd known, as I told one of the substitute therapists on the Christmas break, I would have planned the picture to be horizontally aligned...as it was, they must have thought I was either mentally deranged or just really careless.
The other therapist turned it sideways the way I had planned it. "Oh hey, that's actually pretty cute!"
Labels: anxiety, Brian, doctorlets, Grandma, hip, hospital, mom, nausea, physical therapy, spasms, stairs, walker, wedding, wheelchair
