When I got over to the main building of Side By Side Assisted Living on my first morning officially living there, I had Lesley, my private duty aide (that would be working with me for the 2 to 4 weeks before my Medicaid provided PCA hours kicked in) wheel me into the dining room where the fireplace I’d fallen in love with on my tour a few days earlier was. That woman who had asked me if I was in school the other day was sitting in one of the chairs by the fireplace with her knitting. Lesley moved the empty chair that was next to her so that she could park my wheelchair in its spot.
“You can’t rearrange the furniture,” the woman who was knitting told Lesley.
“I just want to move this chair a little bit, so Becca can sit by the fireplace.” Explained Lesley.
“Well she’s in the way over there,” the woman, whose name I would learn was Toni, insisted.
“I think, if I just move this chair a little bit than she won’t be in the way at all,” Lesley tried to tell her.
“Toni, let the girl be,” yelled one of the aides I had been introduced to the day before. Her name was Cindy, she was short and muscular with grayish shoulder-length hair, a mole on her chin, and a tough no-nonsense attitude.
Toni sniffed hard and went back to her knitting.
“Just don’t run over my stuff,” Toni told me making a big show of moving her pile of yarn out of the way.
“Toni is like that with everyone,” a voice behind me said, “just take her with a grain of salt.” I looked behind me and saw a woman with a walker coming toward me. She sat down next to me in the chair that Lesley had moved out of the way. “Hi, my name is Mary,” she introduced herself.
“Hi I’m Becca,” I smiled at her.
“Well I’ll leave you two girls for now,” Lesley told me. “I’ll be back at 7 PM to bring you back to your apartment for your nighttime routine. Enjoy getting to know people and good luck on your schoolwork.”
After I said my goodbyes to Lesley I turned my attention back to Mary. She was a small woman in her sixties, very thin. She was wearing skinny jeans with a lot of rips and tears in them on purpose, the kind you’d expect to see on a teenager, not an elderly woman. Her shirt was a tight long-sleeved glittery black sweater, she had no chest to speak of and she had a sweater-type shawl on that went all the way down to her knees. Both her arms had bangle bracelets and Native-American-style jewelry with lots of feathers and stuff running up and down them. She even had dreamcatcher earrings.
“Have you lived here a while?” I asked her.
“About a year,” she told me. “My kids made me move here, they didn’t think I was doing a good enough job taking care of myself, I wasn’t really eating or cooking or cleaning my house, my house was a disaster. I don’t like to throw stuff out. They called me a hoarder, moved me in here, and threw out a bunch of my stuff, I still haven’t forgiven them for that.”
“How do they treat you here?” I asked, “Do you live in this building or in one of the independent living buildings?”
“I live in the building next store, but I’m considered part of the Assisted Living. They treat me okay, but Terry the cook is a bitch, she can’t stand me and I can’t stand her.”
“She seemed nice to me,” I said, thinking back to my tour and how she wanted to make a popsicle creation for me for my birthday instead of a cake because she knew I could only tolerate clear liquids, and how she thought of that even though my birthday was more than six months away.
“Oh you just wait and see,” Mary told me.
“Well I think she likes me,” I said.
“She sure doesn’t like me,” Mary told me.
Just then a glimpse of slightly curly dark brown hair caught my eye. I looked up. There was that cleanshaven young-looking face, those bright, lively, hazel eyes, that troublemaker smile.
He was headed over to the table where an old man who I’d been introduced to as Carl was sitting. Carl was in his eighties and had dementia. They made him sit at this one table all day so that they could keep track of him (they did this with all of the dementia patients, but he was the most agitated). Periodically he would get up from the table and start to wander off and then they would yell at him to sit back down. Sometimes he would listen, other times one of the CNAs or Terry would have to get up and physically go over to him and walk him back to the table.
He did have two toy cars they gave him to play with and they would keep him entertained for a few minutes but then he would lose interest and wander again. I felt terrible for him. He obviously needed some kind of enrichment, something to keep whatever part of his mind he had left, busy. It wasn’t fair of them to just expect him to sit at a table all day doing nothing. That was no kind of life. Then he would get agitated and they would decide he needed a PRN of an anti-psychotic med. It didn’t take me long to catch on to this routine and it made me scathing mad. This clearly wasn’t the right place for someone like Carl, they owed it to him to get him somewhere where they could treat him like a human being.
Anyways, when I looked up I saw the mysetery hunk headed to Carl’s table with a Snoopy T-shirt in his hands.
“I know you like Snoopy,” my mystery man was saying. “This shirt is too big on me, and even though you’re shorter then me, you’ve got a little belly going, so I thought maybe you’d like the shirt. Do you want to wear Snoopy?”
He held up the shirt so Carl could see and waited patiently. Carl smiled a big smile and nodded and began trying to take his shirt he was currently wearing off but fumbling with it and grunting.
“Here, do you want me to help you?” the kind mystery man asked. He reached over and very gently helped Carl take the plain blue T-shirt with drool marks on it off and put on the Snoopy shirt. Carl puffed out his chest and grinned.
“Yeah you look good buddy,” the mystery man said. “I’ll keep looking through my clothes and see if I have any other T-shirts that I might be able to give you. He patted Carl on the back, Carl was glowing. Then he began walking away. My cheeks were blazing. This man was not only a cutie pie and sexy beyond belief he was also super sweet and thoughtful and gentle and giving. He was like the man of my dreams.
As much as I thought about how perfect he was, it never really occurred to me that I could ever actually date him. It never really occurred to me that I could ever actually date anyone. I had always been damaged goods, I didn’t get my period, I was sicker than most 85-year-old women, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t finish nursing school. Even once I finished college and got my BA in writing I would never actually be able to get a full-time job because I was in and out of the hospital and incapacitated so often that it just wouldn’t work. Plus, if I got a full-time job I would lose my SSI and Medicaid and then my medical care wouldn’t be covered anymore. I thought no one would ever really be interested in someone like me who was so high maintenance and such a burden because of all the care I required. But, when I saw this mystery man, all logic flew out the window and all I wanted to do was go up to him, grab a hold of him and kiss him right on the lips and feel his arms wrap around me and pull me in and feel him kiss me right back.
“Who is that man?” I asked Mary, when I finally worked up the saliva to speak. My mouth had gone dry with longing for his kiss.
“Oh that’s Jeff, he’s a pain in the butt, he just likes to go around starting trouble,” she told me.
I knew I needed to introduce myself to this Jeff (who I could tell was way more than just a pain in the butt), before the nerves got the best of me.
I put my schoolwork back in my school bag (not to be confused with my medical bag where I stored my tube feeding stuff and my IV fluids and pump), and hung it on the back of my wheelchair.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Mary, and wheeled myself into the kitchen toward the smoking porch where I had seen Jeff head, but when I got there he was nowhere to be found. He had pulled his disappearing act again. Darn it! He kept doing that.
Well, we both lived at Side By Side, so I knew he couldn’t have gone too far and I knew I would see him again, but I wanted to meet him right then and there, so badly that it hurt. I thought that maybe he would show up at lunchtime, so I headed back into the dining room where I had been hanging out with Mary and took my last final paper I had to write for school back out as a distraction (and so that I could graduate) and worked until lunchtime.
At lunchtime, I went back into the kitchen and kind of wheeled around looking for Jeff at his spot at the far end of the booth.
As Chrissy had explained to me, everyone had assigned spots for mealtimes. I had already observed where Jeff’s assigned spot was, but he never showed up.
“You can’t just be wheeling around the kitchen and dining room during meal times,” Cindy the CNA told me. “You’re in the way and we could drop hot food on you or one of the other residents, you need to find one spot to be and just stay there.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” I apologized feeling self-conscious that I had been in the way. I wanted to ask her where Jeff was but didn’t want to be obvious that I was head over heels in love with a man I hadn’t met yet.
After lunch I continued to work on my final paper and then began working on my novel in verse that I was writing. My focus was terrible, I kept looking up and looking around for Jeff-sightings. A few other residents introduced themselves to me. A lot of them seemed to have mental delays or mental health issues on top of their physical disabilities. They were for the most part really nice though, if not a little out there. One man, John, seemed fairly normal. He was a veteran and was super tall and he had a cane with a head like a serpent. He explained to me how he set up all of the computer systems for Side By Side and that he could help me fix the internet connection in my apartment.
“That would be great,” I told him.
“I can come over anytime you want to take a look,” he told me.
“Jeff was having a similar issue in his apartment and we figured it out together.” John explained.
“You know Jeff?” I asked intrigued.
“Oh yeah, he’s always borrowing movies off of me, we watch cartoons together a lot at my place. He’s also really into computers. He’s really good with them too.”
“Oh that’s really good to know,” I said trying to sound as non-chalant as possible. He was smart and good with computers too! Plus he liked cartoons!
“Can I see your computer now to see if there’s anything I can see right off the bat?” asked John.
“Sure,” I agreed.
John sat down in the chair next to me in front of the fireplace and I handed him my laptop after I made sure to save all of my work and log out of Microsoft Word. Toni was still sitting in the other chair knitting. All-day she had been pretty much ignoring me, except when I would get really into a project and be really focused, then, of course, she would start up a conversation with me or want to show me something and pester me until I stopped my writing and responded.
John did a thorough review of my laptop and put in a virus scanner and defense system as well as something called CC Cleaner. The whole time he was setting up my computer we chatted. He told me about his days in a top-secret area of the military, he told me about his spinal cord injury and all his health issues, including the Bristol stool chart he kept on his computer to make sure his bowel movements were regular! He told me about all the places he’d traveled to, his late wife, the stuff he liked to do with his computers for fun. He told me how he and another woman there, Debbie liked to play strip checkers.
I told him how I had been sick since childhood, how my dad didn’t believe I was really sick. I told him about going in and out of hospitals so much that they assigned me, my own permanent nurses, at the children’s hospital. I told him about the nursing home and Jillian and how she almost killed me and then how we became friends. I told him about how I was in school to be a writer and how I’d already published one book through the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition and couldn’t wait to publish more. I also kind of hinted to him that I was interested in meeting Jeff.
“I have to have an EKG done at the Medical Arts Complex tomorrow,” John told me. “We got to check on the old Ticker. It’s not doing so hot. Maybe the day after that, you, me, and Jeff can go over to your place and look at your internet.
It was all so perfect that for a second I didn’t breathe. Jeff was going to come over to my apartment. The Perfect Cutie Heart-Throb was going to be in my apartment in two days! It was better than anything I could ever have even imagined.
“It will have to be in the evening,” I explained. “My caregiver picks me up from here every night at 7 PM and brings me back to my apartment and carries me up the four steps to get in the door. You guys can start looking at the internet and computer issues while she starts crushing up all of my pills and getting all of my night time stuff ready.”
“Okay, we can do that,” John agreed.
I had never really dealt much with the opposite sex at that point. I didn’t know enough to register the way he was staring at my chest, the way his hand on my laptop in the chair next to me kept getting closer to my thigh. It never occurred to me that he would try to come to my apartment at a time that Lesley and Jeff weren’t there, that I should be worried about having men in my apartment, especially horny old men I didn’t know. I was young and naïve and susceptible. I was all set up for disaster.