EARTHQUAKE - Chapter 20

On Thursday afternoon Dr. Kubicki came to Mary’s room.

“I’m going to tell you something that even your husband doesn’t know yet. On Monday you are going to be moved to St. Vincent’s residential physical rehabilitation center in Little Rock. I just got off the phone with Sister Catherine. Your husband had an interview with her this morning and she told him that she would call him when a decision had been made.

“After talking to me, she decided that they would admit you even though there are some on the waiting list ahead of you. I told her how highly motivated you are, how cooperative you have been as a patient, and what difficult obstacles you have overcome in just less than three weeks.

“The whole process of being fitted with a prosthetic leg, learning to put it on and take it off, learning proper care of the stump, and learning to walk with it on crutches and then with a cane can take as much as six months. A very few accomplish it in three months. Most take four to five months.”

“I want to do it in three months.”

“I’m sure that you, God, and Mamaw working together can do it.”

After supper Mary went rolling down the hall. She stopped at the nurses’ station and told Shawnda and Shawanda that she was leaving on Monday. She asked them if they were planning on going mudding this weekend.

“What? Do you think I’m a slow learner, Girl?”

Mary laughed. Further down the hall she stopped at Miss Helen Brumstel’s room.

“How are you doing, Helen?”

“How does it look like I am doing?”

She still had both legs in casts, suspended in the air.

“How are you passing the time? Do you play any of the games or read any of the books on the Kindle?”

“No, I don’t know how to use it.”

“I’m sure any of the nurses would show you how to use it.”

“Yeah, sure, when monkeys fly.”

“You can send emails on it also.”

“I wouldn’t know anybody to send an email to.”

“I’m leaving Monday to go to a residential physical rehabilitation center in Little Rock. I’ll send an email to Shawnda, she can get my address off of it and give it to you. Then if you send me an email, I’ll have your address and then I can write emails to you.”

On the way back down the hall Mary told Shawnda about her conversation with Helen. Shawnda wrote down her email address and promised to show Helen how to use the Kindle. Shawanda overheard the conversation and handed Mary her email address.

“You’d better send an email to me if you send one to Shawnda.”

The next day Dana came with Karl. While they were there and even after they left, the fireworks in her heart were brighter than all of the fireworks in the skies over Monroe and Little Rock that night combined.

On Saturday afternoon Rev. Rowell came by to see her.

“Reverend Rowell, I am so glad you came today. I am leaving Monday morning to go to a residential physical rehabilitation center in Little Rock. I want you to pray with me in thanking the Lord for all His blessings to me. They have just rolled in like white fluffy clouds in a blue summer’s sky. My family has been found. My husband and daughter were not harmed in the quake. My kidneys started working again. I am going to be closer to my family. I have so much to be thankful for to the Lord.

“After we pray, I wish you would go in to see Miss Helen Brumstel. She was injured in the same beauty shop as I was. She is so lonely and blue. I wish she knew the Lord. Tell her you are a friend of mine and that I sent you.”

Rev. Rowell prayed with Mary. After her prayers of thanksgiving, Mary asked the Lord to make Helen happy and help her to find Jesus as a Friend.

Sunday was the last day Mary would be in the hospital. She had said goodbye to Wanda, Ilene, Shawnda, and Shawanda. She hoped that Merrybelle would be working tonight. She had meant so much to her. She had turned her and treated her with special gentleness when Mary was still in a lot of pain.

Finally, Monday morning came. Mary was surprised how quickly everything happened. She had barely finished her breakfast when the men from the ambulance company came to transport her to Little Rock. They were as rough as Merrybelle was gentle. She was loaded onto a stretcher or maybe it was a gurney. It had a mattress pad that felt like it was an inch thick.

They stopped on the first floor. Someone from the hospital office signed some papers. Mary had to sign a paper. Then on out to the ambulance they rolled her. When they lifted her up into the ambulance, the wheels folded under the stretcher. Mary felt them when they hit the bottom of the pad. The ambulance did not ride like a cloud. Mary felt like a sack of potatoes in the back of a farmer’s pickup truck. There was a man riding in the back with her, but he never said anything. It seemed like he was having a hard time holding on.

When they arrived at St. Vincent’s there were more papers signed and exchanged. Then she was lifted from their stretcher into a wheelchair. A pleasant looking blonde nurse introduced herself as Sally Outlaw. She was wearing scrubs and tennis shoes.

“Mrs. Cusak, that will probably be the last time you will be lifted by someone else while you are here. I am going to take you to your room and then I will go over the program here.”

She walked ahead and let Mary roll the wheelchair herself. Mary had never maneuvered a wheelchair onto an elevator before, but Sally stood aside and let Mary figure it out on her own. Mary rolled into the elevator and turned the wheelchair around so that she would be headed out of the elevator when the doors opened again.

“Very good. You must have done this before.”

“No, ma’am. This is my first time.”

“Really? Hey, we are going to get along just fine.”

In the room Sally had Mary demonstrate how she moved from a wheelchair into the bed and then how she moved from the bed to the wheelchair. Next she had her demonstrate moving from the wheelchair to the toilet.

Mary said, “Good. I had that three hours ride in the ambulance and I have been dying to pee.”

Sally laughed. “I like you Mary.”

When Mary came back out into the room, she and Sally sat at the table.

“I have called down for a tray because lunch time is over. Normally, you will eat your meals in the dining room. This facility is very different from a hospital. We make you do everything for yourself that you are able to do. You will see people crying and saying they can’t do something. We just cross our arms, wait for them to quit crying, and tell them again to do it. You won’t be spending much time in bed. You won’t have an afternoon nap unless the doctor orders it. You will be busy all day.

“Everyone’s schedule is different except for meal times. That is because the doctors have to see you individually. You will have one hour a day with one or two physical therapists. They work with you individually.

“You will have time each day with a prosthesis specialist. He will determine when your stump is ready. At first you will just wear a leather cuff, then there will be a weight attached to it. You will work up gradually to wearing an artificial limb. Even after you are wearing a limb, you can’t put any body weight on it for a long time. That means that you have to learn to get around on crutches.

“You have a lot else to learn here. For that reason there are only two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday when your family can visit. Do you have any questions?”

“No.”

“Good, because I hear them bringing your tray. When you are finished eating put all the dishes, utensils, and uneaten food on the cart outside your door. No food is allowed in the room. I’ll go and call your family. They can visit with you for one hour.”

Mary’s head was spinning from all that had happened so far that day and all that Sally told her. She hungrily ate her lunch and went into the toilet to wash her face and hands. She tried combing her hair with her fingers.

Karl and Dana came about an hour later. She tried to recap the things Sally had told her about the program. Karl and Dana brought her up to date on their life especially that they would probably be moving up to Marked Tree or Lepanto and that Karl would be working in Victoria.

“Karl, see if you can get our photograph albums out of the mobile home. They were in the bottom drawer of the dresser in our bedroom. Also, ask Melodie to go to the store and buy me a comb, a hairbrush, a tube of medium red lipstick, some face powder, some hand cream, some shampoo, some tissues. She’s a woman; she’ll know what I need. You can bring them when you come on Saturday. I expect Dana will need some toiletry items also.”

“Daddy gave Melodie $200 to buy me some clothes. She left me to choose what I wanted and I stayed within the $200 limit.”

Exactly one hour later Sally was at the door.

Karl said to Sally, “I know that we can’t visit again until Saturday at    2 p.m., but my wife asked me to buy her some toiletry items like a comb, a hairbrush, toothpaste and toothbrush, and so on. Is there some place that I could leave those things for her tomorrow?”

“Sure, just leave them with the receptionist with your wife’s name on the bag.”

In the time remaining before supper, Sally brought me six elastic bandages.

“These will have to last you until next Monday. I want you to get whatever you need from the bathroom, move up onto the bed, remove the elastic bandage that you are wearing, wash the stump, put on one of these elastic bandages, then wash the bandage you are wearing now. Be careful to rinse out all the soap so that you won’t get a skin irritation on your stump. Then I will show you how to lay out the wet bandage to dry in such a manner that it won’t lose its elasticity.”

Sally was satisfied with how Mary wrapped the stump with the new bandage and how she washed and rinsed the old bandage.

“You don’t have to use this again. It is a cheap one-use bandage, but I can use it to show you the proper way to dry them and when it is dry, you can save it to use as a spare. When you dry them, lay them out on a flat surface with no wrinkling. Never let them hang down over something. If you do they will lose their elasticity. Put them away someplace safe. There are always people who would rather steal a clean bandage than to wash one.

“It is time for supper. Go down to the basement on the elevator, then follow the signs to the cafeteria. Show the cashier this card so she knows you are a patient and you won’t have to pay.”

Mary thought, “She really meant it when she said they expect you to do things for yourself. I am going in a wheelchair down to the basement on an elevator, then look for signs to get to the cafeteria. Once I am in the cafeteria, how will I manage taking a tray through the line and maneuvering a wheelchair?”

Mary found the cafeteria. Then she found several tables marked “For Wheelchair Patrons Only”. She saw a lady sitting at the end of the table and said to her,

“Excuse me, this is my first time. How do you manage to get food on your tray and your tray to the table in a wheelchair?”

“It isn’t as hard as it seems. Roll over to the beginning of the line, get a tray and silverware rolled in a napkin. Put them on your tray, then put your tray down on the bars in front of the line and slide it along until you see something you want. Point to it and the server will put it on your plate and he will wait until you have pointed to all the things you want. He’ll put the plate on your tray and 99 times out of 100 he will carry it to the check out line. You pick up a roll or bread and put them on your tray and get whatever drink you want. You show the cashier your card and she will ring it up with a code so the center pays it. Then she or someone else will ask where you are sitting and will carry it for you.”

“That is awfully nice.”

“Yes and that way they don’t have a mess to clean up if you drop your tray.”

Mary sat beside the lady, whose name is Nelly Lambeth. Nelly has diabetes and had lost a leg because her leg became infected and the poor circulation and poor healing caused by diabetes had allowed the infection to become gangrenous.

Observing other people at her table and nearby tables, Mary could see that some had spunk, some were whiners, some were depressed.

When she returned to her room, Mary found a pamphlet about the proper care of a stump lying on her bed with a note: “Read and study this. You will be given a test on its contents sometime tomorrow.”