Up Is Down and Down Is Up

Sunday, April 11

7:00 pm

I want to start today’s entry by describing one of my greatest difficulties since entering the hospital—namely, trying to use language alone to direct people. It turns out that words like up, down, right, left, and over there mean different things to different people depending on who they are and their perspective at the time. It’s very frustrating, for instance, when I tell a nurse holding a wrist support guard that the hard plastic side goes on top, yet she continually puts the hard side on the bottom. I tell her to rotate it, so she flips it around so that the part of the guard for the hand is closer to the elbow but the hard side is still on the bottom, and I’m unable to point or gesture to set her right. Many times I’ve had difficulty telling people what itches or where; when I say “up” they go sideways. (Christine is laughing now, as I’m listing additional examples but the same communication disconnect is now playing out in the dictation that occurs in real life and she has no idea what I’m describing, demonstrating the very frustration of this challenge.)

As a professional who depends solely on clear communication to help companies win billions of dollars in federal government work, this just reinforces the fact that you have to have multiple people review what you’ve written before you can be sure that the language is not susceptible to misinterpretation.

I have only one complaint about the Sheltering Arms facility thus far: the call system totally sucks. When you push the button, the call goes to your nurse tech and maybe a couple others. If the nurse tech is busy with a patient, she may not get to answering your call; I routinely wait several minutes before someone answers. This morning, I was having some serious neck pain and just needed my pillow adjusted. I hit my call button. It was not answered over the intercom until eight minutes later. I told her that I was in pain and simply needed my pillow adjusted. She said okay and hung up, and no one showed up for another 12 minutes. So I was sitting there in pain for 20 minutes. If you ask me, the call should go to a triage desk that answers everything within two minutes and then rates the urgency of the call. Otherwise they have no idea if someone is in serious distress!

Even though today is Sunday, I had OT on my schedule this morning. It was a busy morning, but we finally got to it around 10:40. We went down to a stim bike that had both foot and hand pedals that operated simultaneously. As before, the tech attached my hands to the handles of the hand pedals. Unlike before, the machine didn’t do all the work for me, so I had to put some effort into pedaling myself. The machine displayed whether one arm or leg was stronger than the other, so that you could adjust. When pedaling forwards, my left side was stronger; when pedaling backwards, it was the opposite. When I tired, my therapist allowed me to rest my legs and we worked on my arms for the remainder of the session.

I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon napping and catching up on calls until PT at 2:30. My PT techs (new people, as Brian was off for the weekend) put me in the overhead harness in the CORE gym. Unfortunately, they did not know how to operate the equipment as well as the techs I’ve worked with previously so it wasn’t as effective as before, but I still walked. I did the 40-foot lap three or four times, sitting down at the end of each. I definitely needed some weight taken off (i.e., increased harness support) while walking to keep my feet from dragging, but I was concentrating mostly on keeping my feet on the outside of an eight-inch yellow line with each step because my steps tend to land towards the center. As I fatigued, my steps were more and more like of those of a drunk man, and I could no longer keep my feet outside the line.

We then did the wheelchair equivalent of squats, with some weight relief from the harness. There was some delay as the techs discussed whether it was necessary to increase or decrease the weight support; they couldn’t agree whether “adding weight” meant increasing the support of the harness or increasing the amount of weight I had to bear on my own (much like my own difficulty with descriptive language discussed above). To make it worse, when I beat the harness in standing up, something would disconnect and the harness would prevent me from sitting down until a tech reconnected it. Eventually, I managed to do six sets of five, but the techs’ uncertainty and the technical issues made the exercise a little frustrating. When we got back up to the room, the tech showed me some exercises I could do while in bed, including foot flexes and leg raises.

Then it was time for a family Zoom with my new granddaughter Emery! It was wonderful to see the family together, even if it was remotely, and we had a fun time talking with each other and admiring the baby. It was very heartening to see “Nana” (Linda) so happy.