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.
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
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.
