Six months after my admission to Hell-crest Commons I was finally preparing to leave. I wasn’t going home. My relationship with my parents had changed completely. But I was preparing to leave. My feelings about the situation were very mixed, but I was very happy that I would no longer be living on a medically complex floor of a nursing home. No matter how nice and buddy-buddy Jillian the nurse practitioner at Hell-crest Commons had tried to become with me, I would never be comfortable with her. Not after everything she had put me through.
However on Monday, the day before my official discharge date, she found me in my room early in the morning and pulled me into her office.
“Can you transfer yourself into that crappy nursing home wheelchair and meet me in my office?” she had asked me.
“Sure,” I had told her, assuming she was just trying to find another way to tell me I needed to work harder in PT to get out of the wheelchair. It did hurt my feelings, because I had busted my butt in PT and gave it my all, and Lynn my PT had told me I had done amazing things. She had also told me that there were certain things that just weren’t going to be possible for me, and one of them was walking on my own again.
By then I had learned that Jillian was just Jillian and you just had to ignore some of the stuff she said because she didn’t always know what she was talking about or how she came off. So I transferred myself into my wheelchair and put my pink Hello Kitty backpack with my tube feed formula bag, tube feeding pump, IV fluids, and IV pump on the back of the wheelchair and rolled down to her office, curious to see what she actually wanted.
When I got there, she was standing outside her office, in front of the door, with the door closed.
“What’s going on?” I asked her confused.
“I have a surprise for you,” she smiled at me.
“You do?” I asked. I was definitely very surprised.
“Yes, I do.” She smiled again. “We had you fitted for your very own customized wheelchair last week, but it won’t be ready for at least another four or five weeks, and we can’t have you riding out of here in that crappy nursing home wheelchair, now can we?” She paused, but I didn’t know what to say so she kept talking. “My daughter had a great wheelchair that worked really well for her for a year or two, but she outgrew it a long time ago. I kept it after all these years because it was such a nice one, she’s too big for it now, she’ll never be able to use it again, and you need something better in the meantime while you wait for your customized chair, so I thought I would give it to you. I know you’ll put it to good use.” Jillian had a daughter a year older than me with Down Syndrome that she took care of in addition to working full time at the nursing home. Her daughter was starting to get really unwell with heart issues.
I was floored. That was the nicest thing Jillian had ever done for me. Maybe she really wasn’t as bad as I had originally thought, just a little too stubborn and closeminded in the way she thought, but her intentions were good.
“Thank you so much,” I told her. “I will put this chair to good use for sure, I will make sure it stays in good condition too, I’ll take really good care of it and I will think of you and your daughter every time I use it,” I promised her. I swore I felt some tears trying to make their way to the corners of my eyes as I thanked her for this generous gesture of hers. I knew how much she loved her daughter and this meant so much to me.
“You just keep up the fight,” Jillian told me. “Never give up hope. You have a fighting spirit in you and I don’t want you to ever lose that.”
“I don’t give up,” I told her.
“Keep it that way,” She told me.
I smiled at her.
On Tuesday morning I woke up really early with my whole body thrumming with electric nerves. It was moving day. I got tired of waiting in bed for the aides to get my vitals and get me washed up and dressed and out of bed so I transferred myself into my brand new wheelchair that Jillian had given me, and picked out my outfit and laid it on the bed and then started packing up all of my stuff that I could reach without needing help.
By the time my mom showed up a few hours later I was completely packed and ready to go. Then we had to go to the nurse’s station and get all of my meds packed up. Jillian and the nurses emptied out my drawer in the Pyxis. There were so many pills and bottles it was crazy. Luckily, I have always known exactly what I take and when and why so I knew what everything was and when my last dose was and when my next dose was due, and everything like that. Because I was going to the Independent Living side of Side By Side I would be responsible for all of my medication.
The Visiting Nurse Agency had explained that they could set up a med box for me so that I wouldn’t constantly have to be opening and closing 25 different bottles of medication. I liked that idea. My mom asked Sarah if they could give me a pill crusher because all of my meds have to be crushed up and put through my J tube, but Sarah said that we would have to stop at CVS or somewhere and buy one ourselves.
Once all of the meds were packed up and we had a list of all of the meds I’m on and when they’re due and everything, then we had to go through a list of all my doctors and future doctors’ appointments and insurance stuff. Then I had to sign a bunch of papers and then we were using hotel-style-luggage-carts and taking multiple trips and between my mom, Sarah, Jillian, and an aide we got six months worth of possessions from my room into the car for the brief drive from Hell-crest Commons to Side By Side Assisted Living, with a quick pit-stop at CVS for a pill crusher.
We met Christy in the parking lot, and she told us we could just head down to the apartment and start putting my stuff away, and then she’d meet us over there and we’d walk over to the office together.
I was so happy to see the apartment’s sunshine yellow walls and big windows and large spaces again. It was such a refreshing change from the depressing layout of the nursing home, and there was no powerful fake air freshener smell covering up the odors of stale urine and feces. My mom parked in the parking lot for my apartment and then unloaded my wheelchair and put it right outside the front passenger door. She gave me my walker so that I could maneuver my way into the wheelchair. I was starting to get really good at this.
Once I was in the wheelchair my mom pushed me up to the steps.
“I’m going to put your walker at the top of the stairs, carry you up, have you stand with your walker for a minute while I carry your wheelchair up and then you can sit back down in your wheelchair.” She explained to me.
“Okay, just try to get the wheelchair up as quickly as you can, because I can’t stand too long with the walker,” I explained.
“I know,” my mom told me.
She grabbed the walker, put it at the top of that stairs and then came back down for me. I reached up toward my mom and grabbed her around her upper shoulders, she grabbed me around my waist and lifted me out of the chair and carried me up the four steps and set me down in front of the walker. Firmly and carefully I put my hands on the walker and tried to focus on keeping my body straight and in alignment as if there was an invisible rod going through my head down through my spine to my feet, just like Lynn had taught me. I could feel my body threaten to tremble and fall, but I held strong for the two minutes it took my mom to get the wheelchair back up to me, and then I collapsed back into it gratefully.
As soon as my mom pushed me inside the front door of my apartment I had the feeling of coming home. I knew this was the right place for me. My life was going to be so much better here. We headed over to the locked door, I unlocked it with the key that I had kept on my wrist all week even though I had known I wasn’t going to need it until today.
Once the whole apartment was unpacked it felt even homier than ever. It was almost like I had already been living there.
Christy met us over there while we were unpacking and once we were done we followed her over to the main office building where she had me sign some papers and go over some basic rules. Then we went up to the kitchen to meet some of the other residents.
Christy had already explained to me that I was by far the youngest resident, but that they did have some middle-aged residents as well. I had understood that this would be the case and was as okay with that as I could be. When we went up to the kitchen, I did notice, seated at the far end of the booth was a younger-looking man with a cleanshaven face, neatly cut and slightly curly dark brown hair, sparkling hazel eyes, and a cat-that-ate-the-canary-smile. He seemed to be teasing an older woman on oxygen who was reading the newspaper and looking kind of miffed with him. He didn’t look like he was older than thirty, and he was so handsome. My heart stopped when I saw him. All I wanted to do was run over to him and be like, “Hi my name is Becca, can I kiss you?”
This was major for me, because up until that very moment in my life at 24 years old I had never had a crush on anyone. I had wondered if there was something wrong with me, I had wondered if I was asexual. I had never had any sort of sexual attraction to any male or female before in my life. But I saw that man, and I knew I had a major crush on him, my first crush ever. I knew I needed to find out his name, and more about him, and get to know him, but I didn’t want to give away the fact that I was falling in love with him before I even met him.
Just then he looked up at me, and we made eye contact. He smiled at me. I felt my insides melting, I smiled back, but then I looked away, afraid my face would give something away, that I’d come off too desperate, that I’d drive him away before we even had a chance to meet. When I looked back up again he was still looking at me smiling, I didn’t know what to make of that. I suddenly felt embarrassed. Did I have something on my face? Was he looking at the wheelchair? Did he think I was a little kid?
I wanted to ask Christy what his name was, how old he was, find out more about him, but I didn’t want her to know that I was obsessing about him.
Christy was too busy introducing me to all of the old people who were mumbling hi and then going back to staring through the TV screen or mumbling to themselves or doing crossword puzzles. One woman was knitting and asked me if I was in school. I explained to her that I was in college and she seemed satisfied. Another woman told me she ran the art group, when I told her I loved art she told me that I should come back to the main building at 6 o clock on Thursday evening to join them, I promised her I would since I knew I would still be in the building then anyway. My private duty aide wasn’t set to pick me up until 7 O clock.
After Christy finished introducing me to a bunch of people that unfortunately didn’t include the mystery sexy man in the corner who had now disappeared, she asked me if I was ready to have my mom push me back to my apartment so I could meet my private duty aide who was supposed to come to meet me, my mom, and Christy and I for our initial interview. The aide’s name was Lesley and she worked at the hospital as a CNA but was looking for extra work outside the hospital. So far I had spoken to her over the phone and on FaceTime and she seemed like she would be a good fit for me. She was in her thirties, upbeat, energetic, happy, non-judgmental and interested in finding out more about my particular diagnoses and issues and how to best care for me.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” I told Chrissy, and we headed back over to my apartment to meet up with Lesley.
As my mom started pushing my wheelchair through the kitchen towards the front door I kept looking around trying to find the beautiful young man with the gorgeous impish smile but I didn’t see him anywhere. The whole way down to my apartment, he was all I could think of. I somehow knew, from a place deep within me, that that man was special and that I needed to get to know him more.