I generally like our house. I call it The Doghouse (because my business is Wag's Creations, so it kinda fits). It's homey and it is also where I run my business which is quite obvious as it often overflows into the main parts of our dwelling rather than staying contained in the back 2 bedrooms and garage. Coming home to the familiarity of the mess that I've created was comforting. But not realistic. As a general every day rule, I often have boards for various projects leaned against the wall in our hallway drying after a first coat of paint, or frames for the little kids tables and chair sets in the living room leaned against the end of the sofa waiting to go to the paint shop, or customer's orders sitting on top of the dog crate waiting to be delivered and any number of a million other projects scattered throughout the space. I'm a messy creator. I've tried over the years to be more streamlined and I have improved on it, but just not completely accomplished in this area yet. I think it is because my brain goes so quickly from one project to another and I always have several projects going at once that causes me to spread things out (and now in retrospect, spread myself too thin). Whatever the reason for my enterprise to take over our home, it was unacceptable and definitely not ADA compliant! Tommy has always been a packrat so it doesn't phase him. He just piles his stuff wherever he wants and we are two messy, hoarding ragamuffins living in harmony.
So, when I came home and my mobility was limited to moving with a walker, it was time to change the freestyle organization techniques that we had grown accustomed to. Tommy busied himself that Saturday morning with cleaning and moving and picking up laundry and reassigning Wags to its proper place in the backrooms and making our house accessible to me. He did a great job in a little amount of time. But there was one area he could not fix. The bathroom. Whoever designed houses in the mid-80s (when ours was built) must have been smoking some pretty serious stuff because the hallucinations of the well-designed home I'm sure they thought they were creating missed the mark.
Our master bedroom adjoins to our master bath. The doorway from the bedroom to the bathroom is an acceptable size and leads into a dressing and sink area that is about 10 feet long. Then, you have to enter another door to get to the toilet and tub area. The most important area. The first time I had to use the bathroom, I traversed the great distance from our bedroom to the bathroom. (Did I mention that when you have a stroke you may need to anticipate things like bathroom trips because when the urge hits, you are not gonna get there any time soon?) Cleared the first doorway, no big deal. Negotiated the 10 feet through the dressing area to the inner sanctuary and was stuck. Yep. Seems as if the cracksmokers that built the house made this doorway about 6 to 8 inches narrower than the other one. I was not going anywhere on my own. Seriously? What is the purpose of this? So my dear husband had to come help me make the journey the last 5 feet to the toilet for the first several days. But that's not where the fun and games ended.
3" to 4" makes an amazing difference. I know some of you are going to run that straight into the gutter...go wherever you want with it. I'm taking it straight to the toilet. You see, regular height toilets are between 14" and 16" tall. Ours at our house are 14" tall. A regular handicap toilet is about 17" to 19" in height. As weak as my legs are, getting down to that 14" level was extremely difficult. But the law of gravity helped me because once I started to sit down, my butt was pulling me the rest of the way. So getting down was not the issue. It was the getting up part that made it nearly impossible. And don't think we have the lovely assistance bars on our walls, or even a cabinet or countertop ANYWHERE near the toilet to aid in this process. Nope, we have to have a quacky house with the toilet sitting over in the Siberia area of the bathroom while all other fixtures are mounted in a sane and totally acceptable position. Poor Tommy had to help me up every time. I am sure he was thinking, "for the love of Pete, what did I do to deserve this punishment?" We'd conquer the shower another time. It was just too much to deal with at the current time.
After making our house as accessible as possible that morning, it was finally time to go get Shadow. I couldn't wait! She came running out, pulling the leash like a crazy dog and hopped up in the window to give me a ton of kisses. We missed each other so much. But she loves daycare and "camp" so I'm sure she didn't miss me while she was there.
Back at The Doghouse, the yard still needed mowing and laundry and dishes needed done (I was planning on doing the Monday night dishes when I finished at storage on Tuesday so they had just been rinsed and were sitting in the sink.). I really really really (yes it needs 3 of them) wanted to be able to help do some of these things. Our house had a stale, musty smell. Like when you come home from vacation and its been closed up too long. Unfortunately I just couldn't do any of these things. I had no strength, no stamina, and frankly, I was doing a great fete of balancing well enough to walk with the walker. Tommy relegated me to sitting at the kitchen table (I didn't dare sit in one of our living room chairs, I'd sink down into it and they'd still be trying to pull me out of one of those things, and I hadn't worked up to our super cushy sofa yet) and working on the hand and arm exercises they had given me when I was discharged. He needed to do yardwork but he was afraid to leave me alone. They still had not determined what had caused either of the strokes and he was just fearful a third stroke would occur, or that I'd try to get up and fall or who knows what goes through a guy's mind. Needless to say, I wasn't even gonna stay inside by myself while he was doing yardwork. So his buddy, Slim, came over to babysit me.
Slim is honestly at least 6.5 feet tall, I think, and I swear you could read the Sunday comics through him because he's so thin. He came over and watched golf and played with Shadow while Tommy started working on the yard. Slim isn't very talkative for the most part, which was fine with me, because I still couldn't talk very well and wasn't sure what I'd say to him if he did want to talk. So we sat in silence. Me at the kitchen table playing with Play Doh (it's what they suggested I use since nobody in the metro area seemed to have TheraPutty) and him in the recliner watching golf. About an hour into the babysitting (our yard honestly takes at least 2 to 3 hours to do from start to finish since we live on a corner lot and if you are running the weedeater too), Slim had to leave and he was relieved of his babysitting duties by BigSis. She's another of Tommy's friends that if I had an older sister, I think she is what I'd imagine her as. She's smart with numbers like Tommy, but she has a personality too. Some of the smart numbers people are b-o-r-I-n-g! She was NOT going to sit there and watch golf. Nope. Not happening.
She immediately started doing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. Tommy came in and told her to stop because it would make me feel uncomfortable for somebody else to clean. And normally it would have made me very self-conscience and upset that an outsider was seeing our mess, let alone cleaning it up...but ya know what? I think that went away when they stripped me of my clothes in the ER. I have had to accept over the past week that I cannot do things on my own and that it is okay to ask for help. And that people truly WANT to help (or most of them do). I have long lived with the thought that I need to do it all on my own because asking other's shows a sign of weakness. Besides, why should somebody else be bothered with my crap? BigSis knocked those dishes out in no time flat and had the kitchen looking pretty clean. I was impressed. And I'm just as impressed that Tommy & I have managed to keep it that way for the most part.
With the yardwork done, the dog happily back at home, and the kitchen cleaned up, the weekend wasn't turning out too bad. Except now we had to figure out what to eat. I hadn't been grocery shopping before the stroke and Tommy was so busy with everything else that it was all he could do to get the minimum done, so he had no time for the store or cooking a complete meal. So it was pizza. PapaJohns to the rescue. They were running a special on their large pizzas so we ordered 2 large pizzas thinking we'd have leftovers. And we did...for the next 4 meals. The next day was spent eating pizza, doing hand and arm exercises, and loving on Shadow. Monday would start the great rehab advernture. So we thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment