Upon arriving at a nursing home, the most important thing to decide is if you are a bed-wetter. There is no shame to being a bed-wetter and whether you want the label or not, sooner or later you will wet your bed. In this home there are 3 to 4 aides for every 34 patients, so you do the math. Those poor people would be doing potty duty 24/7 if they answered every buzzer at the precise moment that everyone needed to go. Hence the need for the "Don't call them diapers" adult protection brief or even worse, the foley. Loss of bladder control is a known result of a spinal cord injury (and a known result of getting older). When I first arrived I could not get out of bed or walk on my own, so I tried to anticipate my need to urinate and gauge the aides' response times. For the most part I was able to get through my first couple of weeks with only a few accidents. Now, they have declared me independent in the bathroom (which means I can go whenever I want BY MYSELF), but they have also prescribed a "water pill", which means I do nothing but pee between 12:30 and 3pm. Sigh!
Special note: If you are a bed-wetter, an unlimited supply of "Don't Call Them Diapers" (DCTDs) are provided for a nominal fee. You will be checked and changed at least twice a night. So you will lose sleep and there may be a slight loss of dignity due to people checking your DCTD during the night. The same loss of sleep will be felt by a roommate (Me) of a DCTD wearer, due to the DCTD wearers screams and explicit language at being checked twice a night. No charges are made for the many nightgowns and sheets that need to be changed every night.
My Adventures in a Nursing Home
How did I get here?
Let me start out by saying I never expected to be living in a nursing home at the age of 55. Actually I never expected to be living in a nursing home period. Few people do I suspect. Ten years ago a tumor was found inside my spinal cord. They removed it and I learned to walk again. Easy Peasy... OK, not Easy Peasy, but I went from wheelchair to walker to cane to walking. I did it and while not fully functional, I got around. Two years ago I quit a job in Pennsylvania because I was miserable. I've worked in TV for 30 years and have always been able to find work so I didn't worry. Then the recession/depression happened and no one was hiring. In order to save money I let my Cobra health care go, then discovered no one else would insure me with my disability. To make matters worse, the money was running out, my 401K was a quarter of its former bulk and then in April of '09 I started losing feeling again in my right leg. Did I tell my family or go see a doctor? No, I'm stupid and decided to see if it will get better by itself. Big mistake. Then I fell in September and to quote a bad commercial "could not get up". So I laid there on my apartment floor for a week until my brother and sisters became frantic and called my landlady. She broke in, then there were ambulances, hospitals, MRIs, CAT scans, etc. Finally they did a test called a mylogram, a lovely procedure where they inject dye in your spinal cord and hang you upside down, and discovered that my spinal cord had not healed correctly after the original surgery. According to the neurosurgeon, I have a "tethered spinal cord" and my next fall could tear my spinal cord out. My family (who all live in North Carolina) freaked and I now find myself in a Pennsylvania nursing home learning to walk again and waiting for disability to kick in so I can move to a rehab facility in NC. Since I have to be here anyway I thought I would give people a preview of what could be your future in a nursing home.
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