Jeff, the man of my dreams (although, at that point, I hadn’t told him how I felt about him), was waiting for me at my spot near the fireplace when I got off the elevator and turned the corner into the dining room in the main building of Side By Side Assisted Living. Lesley, my private duty aide, parked me right next to him. He had a big impish grin on his face, but when he saw I’d been crying, his grin melted away and he looked concerned.
Jeff with his impish grin
“What happened Becca?” He asked me.
“I’m not allowed to say,” I told him, “But I’m not allowed to have any men in my apartment anymore.”
“Who said that?” he asked me. “Your parents? They shelter you way too much, you know I-”
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.
My friend Laura came to pick me up and bring me to the synagogue (Shul) every Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath services and every Jewish holiday. When she came to pick me up the day after I’d been promised by Tanya, the social worker at Hell-Crest Commons the nursing home I’d been living at for almost six-month and Jillian my main provider at the nursing home they would figure something out, I was far from settled. I had been forced to take a break from calling places, and asking questions (because it was the weekend), but I was still busy making lists and doing more research, and worrying my brains out of my head. It was like my brain was a washing machine set on the highest spin cycle and someone had put too much laundry soap in it so it was spraying bubbles everywhere.
Tuesday morning a woman from a place called Adlib came up to my room to introduce herself to me and do an intake meeting. She was a sweetheart. Her job was to figure out if I was appropriate to get support serviced from Adlib one of which would be getting into an Assisted Living called Side By Side. For the last six months, I had been living on the intensive medical/Ventilator floor of Hell-crest Commons, but now they were kicking me out because although I had made a whole ton of progress in PT and OT I had made about as much progress as was humanly possible for me in my condition and my progress had plateaued. I had spent over two weeks trying to figure out where I was going next, now that I was going to be discharged from the nursing home, as my parents were refusing to … Find Out What Happens Next
My nerves were humming so loud that I could feel them vibrating from inside of me, or maybe that was just my heart that was still always beating too fast no matter what medication I took or how much IV fluid got infused into me.
After six months of living in a nursing home that I not-so-lovingly referred to as Hell-Crest Commons I was going to visit Side By Side Assisted Living and meet with one of the Nurse Managers there, whose name was Chrissy. Tanya the social worker had also arranged for my weekly scheduled visit with my mom to be that day as well. I had no idea what to even begin to expect.
Side By Side was just a few minutes from the nursing home and it was a big main building that was actually two houses combing together and then a bunch of other houses in … Find Out What Happens Next
As time went on at Hell-Crest Commons, the nursing home I’d been living in since July of 2015 I was slowly settling in. I would work on classes for college online (I was only a couple classes short of graduating with a degree in Professional Writing Studies and a GPA of 3.98 from Elms College), I would go to some of the activities groups, I had gained privileges to wheel myself around the grounds of the nursing home by myself and I would go to the coffee shop and chat with various visitors, people from my unit that I met down there, and people from other units. Some days I would go down to the lobby to sit on the couch and read or work on a personal writing project or make personal phone calls to friends from Facebook or family.
