The Rehab Unit

My husband’s move to the rehab unit was not an easy one.  Now being alert brings an abundance of other difficulties.  For most people you start to become aware of your surroundings.  For my husband, he didn’t have a clue of what or where his surroundings were.  He could now feel all the pain of his injuries, he still was unable to eat much, he had memory loss, aphasia, his right arm did not function and he had spasticity.  Probably the most difficult part for his was trying to figure out where he was and what had happened to him.  Combine all of this with the move to a new unit and new staff and you get a disaster in the making. 

The nursing unit was not at all prepared to get a patient who had a permanent shadow (me).  I wasn’t about to leave him alone.  I felt that a constant familiar face was a good thing to have around someone who was so disoriented.  He was going to have a great struggle putting together the pieces of what had happened to him and I meant to be there to help him and no one was going to dissuade me from doing so.  At first I butted heads with many of the nursing staff, but eventually we became one big happy family.

On his first day on this unit, he began working.  Poor guy was so confused, but the speech therapist’s goal was to get him up into a chair and bring him down to the dining room to try and practice eating.  It did not go well.  Food was about the last thing he wanted to have.  Of course prior to all of this, he had to have a swallow test to see if he could eat food.  He passed!  (My husband was always a good test taker!)  However, to ease the start of trying to digest food, all of it was mush and liquids were thickened.  If I was dragged through the desert and starved for days, I don’t think I could have handled it.  It was so unappetizing!   Think of water with the consistency of a thick paste, yum.  He would look at it, look at me and push it away.  So much for the start of therapy.

Next he moved on to physical therapy.  They had the honor of being referred to as physical terrorists.  This was another part of the day that he was not fond of.  I thought it was the best.  This was going to help him walk again.  They would exercise his legs, try to get him to stand and then show me exercises to do with him when he went back to his room.  He could hardly keep his eyes open during this part nor could he accomplish any of the tasks that were thrown his way.

Occupational therapy came next and they wanted to try to get his arm to move and best of all, reacquaint him with the bathroom.  Such enthusiasm on their part, not much on my husband’s part.  All of this in one day, his first day!  By the time this day was over, he was pooped.  And it was closing in on dinner.  It was time again for the luscious array of mushy food.  He did not make it.  Sleep set in.  He would have to start all over again tomorrow.  His job was going to be to relearn everything that we all take for granted.  My job was to learn how to help him succeed.  And so both our challenges were being stacked up with the odds at this time, not too good.  I suddenly felt like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind…Tomorrow is another day!