The Two Kinds of Decay

Rehabilitation

My third hospitalization was fourteen days instead of the usual ten because the covering neurologist didn’t schedule my five plasma exchanges right away. I had to wait a day or two before each one, and during those days the antibodies ate away at my nerve cells. By the end of the hospitalization I could breathe, but I still couldn’t walk.

And so on May 26, 1995, the last day of my longest hospitalization, it was decided I would move to a rehabilitation hospital where I’d learn to walk and use my hands again.

My parents had already been to my college dorm and packed everything and brought it home. Somewhere in there was a small pipe and a few extra screens and a film canister full of marijuana buds.

They drove me to a northern Massachusetts town none of us had ever been to.

I was admitted and shown my room, which I would share with an old woman who coughed and whose medications and preparations filled our bathroom.

I had a bed, a night table, and a chair. There was a window I could look out of. Outside was Massachusetts.

A nurse came in to take my temperature with one of the new infrared ear thermometers that no one knew how to use yet.

She reported my body temperature as eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

I suggested that that was not possible since I was still living.

She took my temperature several more times and eventually recorded it as ninety-two degrees.

My parents and I went back to the room I would share with the old woman. She was watching television, in bed, in semidarkness. My father picked up my suitcase. My mother wheeled me outdoors to the parking lot and helped me into the car.

I would rehabilitate at home.

My father carried my pop-up trundle bed downstairs to the living room, under a window that looked out onto our road. I was brought a small round table from the screen porch. My mother made sure there was always some food on it, usually a protein drink.

I staggered, with the help of a walker or a person or both, to the downstairs lavatory a few times a day. There was a toilet and a sink there.

For my evening trip, my mother brought three towels and a new white plastic chair into the tiny lavatory. I sat on the chair and gave myself a sponge bath.

A nurse came every other day to change the dressing on my central line. My physical therapist came three times a week. I remember the day I was able to walk up four steps. That happened in summer.

Once I was able to get myself all the way up the thirteen steps to the second floor of the house, I moved into my childhood bedroom.

I remember being strong enough to crawl upstairs but not strong enough to stand upright. I’d crawl to my bedroom, crawl up onto my bed, roll over onto my back, and slide down onto my feet. Ta-da!

My bath chair became my shower chair. I used my parents’ bathroom, which had a shower stall.

I affixed my infant mobile, with its soft yellow and blue ducks, to my headboard once I was upstairs in bed, to celebrate the humiliation my life had turned to.