h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Car Wash

I see my feet three times a week. These are shower days -- Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for South Back, and Monday, Wednesday and Friday for South Front, a.k.a. Skilled hall. Well, yes, I can look down the length of the bed and there they are, and I also observe them resting on the foot supports of my scooter, but we are no longer intimate the way we used to be. There was a time when I hearkened to their every whisper, but that was when they took me everywhere I wanted to go. Now we are profoundly divorced. Their whispers go unheard.

But on those three days of the week, my feet and I get close. Not intimate. Our relationship, as I carry out the pedicure and exfoliating and so forth, is more like that between a dog and a professional groomer. I can't feel them but still feel responsible for them. In fact the more you think about it the more bizarre is paraplegia. But that, as Arlo Guthrie once said, isn't what I come to talk about.

Luz is my aide on the day shift. After breakfast she rounds up the shower chair and the hoyer lift (shown with another CNA, Linda, at http://www.lilatladera.com/h2g2/hoyer.jpg ) and we begin the process of getting me to the shower room. I crank my bed flat and Luz shakes out my sling, a length of heavy mesh fabric with six appendages, canvas hooks. She bodges it under me -- a maneuver we call the tuck and roll -- then hooks each appendage of the sling to a corresponding hook of the hoyer. At this point a second CNA will join us, the spotter. Then I get lifted and swung over to the shower chair, a throne-like assembly of mesh and PVC with two positions, straight up or leaning back. This is actually sort of fun, unless the battery pack runs down, in which case I get to dangle while one of the two aides jogs off to get a replacement. Low battery is a common occurrence because there are but two hoyer lifts in the facility, and they get quite a workout on shower days.

So now I'm in the shower chair. I grab my tote of soaps and such, Luz throws a sheet over me, and we're ready to go. The shower room is on the other side of the nurses' station, and Luz has to push me around, avoiding approximately seven wheelchaired people along the way; most are clustered there waiting their turn to be pulled into the shower. A couple, R and L, are just loose cannons. If Rita is there, I won't be allowed past her until we've held hands. She's a sweet old Navajo lady with colon cancer and failing kidneys and a wonderful smile; every time she passes my room she stops and waves until I wave back and say, "Ya'a ta hey, Rita!" (That's 'hello' in Navajo.) Then she nods and smiles and moves on, leaving me with a big smile of my own.

This is a Tristram Shandy of a shower -- I'm on the fifth paragraph and haven't even got into the room yet.

I don't know whether I mentioned that this building is about 35 or 40 years old, and what is most entertaining are the places where Original Design came up against Money and lost. You can't see these places, you can only experience them. During my first year here, I was showered on a gurney, not the chair -- you can see a corner of the gurney in the hoyer picture. That was what led to my calling it a car wash. Occasionally I would be parked outside the shower room to wait until one of the front stalls came free. There are clerestory windows in that wall, with vertical blinds, and right beneath the windows are fluorescent lights panelled with frosted plastic. Well, as I lie on the gurney I notice that big jagged holes have been punched into that frosted panelling so that the blind controls have somewhere to hang. Oops!

Still not in the shower room. Let's get on with it. The first time I was wheeled into the shower room, on the gurney, I saw clouds. One of the staff members had painted the ceiling throughout the room with fluffy white clouds. This delighted me and I was about to exclaim about it when wham! the gurney hit the wall. Seems Money took the shower room and made it a little smaller, and now the gurneys have a hard time getting around the corner into the front stalls unless the aides really jam them through. I'm happy to have graduated to the shower chair because I don't take up nearly as much room, and can slip through to my favorite stall, where I imagine the water pressure is a little stronger.

I spend an inordinate amount of time in the shower just enjoying the feel of hot water on skin. The shower aide usually attends to two or three of the older and frailer ladies before I need her help to wash my back and lower legs (leaning forward remains a dangerous thing for me to do). Then I get a couple of towels and a few minutes before Marta is back with a fresh nightgown and a modesty sheet. She usually hauls me back to my room and tells Luz that I'm ready to be put down again. So we repeat the process with the hoyer lift, and finally I'm sitting up in bed with my hair dryer, toothbrush and toothpaste and all that. And it's nearly 11 in the morning. My feet are waiting for me.

[Amy P]

I am so enjoying reading your Art of Death Thank you so much!
You write so beautifully - your words flow across the screen and into my heart!
I just found this and read all the way through from 1 up to here.
I am so excited that there are going to be 16! more installments!

I am still following, partly for the little buzzes when you drop in stuff like 'as Arlo Guthrie once said, {that} isn't what I come to talk about'.

Deb

reddit

I'm sure I've been in a sling, very simular to the one you describe... albeit in somewhat differnt circumstances

I've seen some pretty neat solutions, in peoples houses, for the problem of letting them shower, when they've been living independantly, in a wheelchair etc, but in nearly all cases these were people who ended up in a wheelchair, at a relatively young age, and via a work related accident (mostly oil industry stuff), and who got a lovelry big pay out of money from their insurance, which let them either adapt their houses entirely, or indeed just buy a new place, or have one built, to their requirements... I can't even have a visitor to my house in a wheelchair; unless I coudl, and they didn't mind, my having to carry them up the stairs, as there isn't any other way into the actual* house, other than into the donstairs hallway and up the staircase

I was "lucky" in that my house was one story and mostly open plan so that I was still able to get about once I was permanently en-chaired. Only in the bathroom were quarters cramped; it took a three point turn to get to the commode...

The main person I knew, was a guy in a wheelchair, after an accident on an oil rig or simular, I think he'd have been in his thirty's or forty's, and he got, as far as I could tlel a huge compensation from the firm, for the accident (from the insurance company I guess).
They had a gorgeous, massive single storey bungalow/house, which was in a big area of land, by the river... all* the rooms were big, so it was easily accessible for his wheelchair, and it'd been designed with not a step in sight; not even those horrible little 'lips' you sometimes get between doors/rooms; the bathroom was massive, and the shower drain was just on the floor, so he could shower whilst in a chair (not sure if it was a differn chair to the main one he used), and everything in there seemed really well designed; This was quite a number of years ago, mind, as I only knew them, through my Mother, who did housework for them...

There's always something to learn from these journals. Today's is "clerestory windows". I never knew they had a name!