Rehab Begins

So after three months in the hospital, we were home!  Now the total test of my wits was going to begin.  While in the hospital, my husband was safe and sound.  He had people around him attentive to his every need.  But home was home and it was just me doing it all.

We had the week end to adjust to being home.  My husband got a chance to do nothing but rest for the first time in months.  However, come Monday morning, the next phase would begin.  I had to have him at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago by 9:00 am.  We got there and the receptionist was less than friendly.  (My husband and I would joke about that in the months to come.)  They took all our information and Tim was ready to begin.  He met all his therapists, we got the tour of the facility and received all our instructions.  For a facility that deals with people who have experienced neurological injuries, I have to say they were not exactly warm and fuzzy.  It is kind of odd as we have been to a number of the RIC facilities and only one of them really stands out in my mind as having good customer service.  But I suppose it is not about how nice they are, it is really about how good of care my husband would receive.  (Although, I would have liked a little of both.  Maybe it was just the mother hen in me!)

If I could back track a moment, I should have realized that things might not be all peachy keen once he started this out patient care.  The last week my husband was still in the hospital, the social worker was making arrangements with this RIC facility.  She told me that someone would contact me and come out to talk to us at the hospital.  Now I was at the hospital every day from sunrise to midnight.  My husband was napping one afternoon and I stepped out of his room and walked to the family waiting room for a moment to make a phone call.  When I returned I found a folder with papers in it about RIC.  My husband told me that someone was there and left it.  He did not know who she was or why she was there.  I stopped at the nursing station (which was directly outside my husband's room) to ask who it was.  They thought that it was a representative from RIC.  So I called them immediately and asked who was there and why she did not call me so I could be in the room.  Now I realize that my husband was a 49 year old man at the time.  However, he had suffered a massive TBI with complete memory loss and speech impairment.  You would think that instead of just wandering into his room, she would have called ahead so someone would be there with him.

Anyway, Tim was assigned a primary physical therapist to monitor all his care.  Within one week she was gone and a new one was assigned.  At this point, things got markedly better.  Several new therapists were brought in and things started to really improve.  I guess all it took was a change in management!

So for the first few weeks, Tim would go to therapy from 9:00 to noon.  They then convinced him that he needed to stay all day.  It took a lot of convincing for him to finally agree.  He now had to bring a lunch with him and any medications that he needed to take during the day.  This was going to be interesting because, he had no idea when he was supposed to take any of his medication or what they were for.  The facility said they could not give it to him.  He needed to be responsible for his own things.  Not so easy for someone with a brain injury.  I now had to come up with food he could easily eat one handed and drinks that he could open on his own.  I put his medication in a small envelope, packed it in his lunch and instructed him to take it when he unpacked his lunch to eat.  When we arrived in the morning, I would go with him to the kitchen and he would put his lunch in a specific place in the refrigerator so he would remember where it was and could reach it.  It always had to be in a paper bag, so when he finished eating, he could just throw it all away.

In the beginning, I stayed with him and just waited out in the lobby.  When he started to go all day, it was soon apparent that they really needed him to concentrate and I was becoming a distraction.  So I would bring him in the morning, stay for a little while and then come back later in the day.  This seemed to work out well as he was getting used to the routine.  The work was very, very difficult.  His communication skills were just starting to come back, but extreme pain persisted and fatigue was the worst.  His first month home was less than stellar.