Last week the hospital deemed my mom recovered enough from her stroke to be shipped to rehab. Word must have gotten out about her penchant for sneaking out of bed, as her new bed was in a mesh cage.
It looked like a bounce house. Or one of those playpens at Chuck-E-Cheese minus the plastic balls. My mom had regained enough verbal and cognitive skills to object to being "zipped up in there all night," waiting for a nurse to spring her whwn she needed to use the bathroom.
So we struck up a deal with the staff. My dad and I would alternate staying over with her if they moved her to a normal room. The nurses agreed. They needed the cage bed for a new patient who was worse off anyway.
My mom recovered so quickly that she was mistaken for a visitor. I, on the other hand, was actually mistaken for a patient . I'm lucky I wasn't zipped up.
After a week in rehab they sent my mom home. She walked and talked fine, but the rehab crew warned that her attention span needed work. This probably explained what happened when she wanted her favorite snack- a slice of cheese. Except instead she grabbed an open can of coke, tipped it on its side and tried to slice it. It wasn't until it spilled on the counter that she noticed it wasn't cheese. Whoops.
Then came the shoe incident. As she put her sneakers on my dad suggested we water the plants before we went outside. After a dispute about which watering kettle to use she took a shoe to the sink and began to fill it with water.
I braced myself for similar incidents but in the last 48 hours she's been doing well. She's back to brushing her teeth (instead of her paperback books). She's back to using eating utensils properly (and, might I add, using the correct end of each) A bit careless, perhaps, but if you met her on the street you wouldn't think anything was wrong. Not bad, considering two weeks ago she didn't know who I was.
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