I met Jeff at Side By Side Assisted Living and fell in love with him. After being best friends with him for 6 months we began dating. He decided to go so far as to convert to Judaism for me so that my family would accept him. At one point we thought he had a death sentence.
We had gone to his oncology appointment at UMass Memorial Medical Center with Dr. Swizzer. The doctor told him they had found a shadow on his liver. The shadow was possibly a recurrence of his liver cancer. They referred him to a more local GI doctor to take a better look at the scan. Dr. Xander’s job was to confirm whether or not it was cancer.
After Jeff’s oncology appointment he went to see his team coordinator for the liver transplant team. They explained that if Jeff had … Find Out What Happens Next
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-”
People might think that living at an Assisted Living at the age of twenty-four would be miserable, but I was living in one of the Independent Living apartments, and it was like having my very own apartment. It was a huge improvement on the nursing home I’d been in for the six months prior. I had made friends with a man named Jeff, who was so cute and attractive and I was completely in love with him (but too scared to say anything), and I’d also made friends with a man named John. I had Lesley, a really kind and caring private aide, taking care of me every day, I was finishing my last few projects for school and then I would be graduating summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.98 from Elms College with a BA in writing.
I hadn’t even been living on my own for a full week, and already, disaster had struck. About five days earlier I had been discharged from the nursing home that I not-so-lovingly referred to as Hell-Crest Commons where I had been held prisoner for six months, I had then moved into the Independent Living section of Side By Side Assisted Living in Pittsfield. While I had been loving, living at Side By Side, earlier that morning I’d been molested by a man that I thought I could trust. I’d been molested by a man that I thought was my friend.
Not knowing what to do, I had called the main building, and Marina, the overnight staff had picked up and was on her way over from the main building to my apartment to help me out.
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.
In December of 2015, I was finally discharged from Hell-Crest Commons, the nursing home that I’d been living in for the last six months, and I had moved into the Independent Living Section of Side By Side Assisted Living where I would be getting something called PCA care which basically meant people that I chose myself, and that I was the boss of and would train would be coming into my apartment at Side By Side to help take care of me. because it would be 2 to 4 weeks before the PCA care kicked into effect my parents had agreed to pay out-of-pocket for a private duty aide until then.
Lesley, the CNA who was going to be my private duty aide, was right on time to meet Christy, my mom, and me, over at my apartment on the evening of the Tuesday I moved in. She drove a … Find Out What Happens Next
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.
For the two days after I spoke with John, a very tall big man who walked with a serpent cane, all I could think about was meeting Jeff officially. John had informed me that he was really good at fixing computers and was in charge of the internet and computer system at Side By Side Assisted Living the place where I now lived despite the fact that I was only 24 years old. John had noticed the internet was down in my apartment and offered to fix it. We had a long conversation where he somehow picked up from me that I had a major crush on Jeff.
“Jeff and I go way back,” Jonh told me. “He’s amazing with computers himself. How about I bring him with me when I come over to fix your internet, and then the three of us can just hang out?” he suggested.
When you have any sort of severe life-threatening chronic illness, there is a terrible feeling of being at the mercy of the medical system. If your doctor is in a bad mood it could be the end of your life. That is not an exaggeration.
I suffer from a disease called Small Fiber Autonomic Polyneuropathy, which is a very rare condition that most doctors have never even heard of, because of that I often get denied the proper treatment even though I know what the right thing to do is. The doctors don’t like to admit they don’t know something so they just plow forward with their ideas and I’m the one that gets hurt or sicker or almost dies (not an exaggeration, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve almost died due to doctors who don’t know about my illness deciding they know more than me and going … Find Out What Happens Next
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.
