Energy

With Ezra in the therapy room

Went yesterday afternoon with young Ezra and found Mom in the penalty box looking a little wild-eyed. She'd had a two-hour nap after lunch and had a lot of spunk. She led us downstairs to the therapy room and got us playing three-way "tennis" with rackets and balloons. There's a walkway down there with a rail on either side and we got her up and she walked back and forth a dozen times very deliberately, with long steps, counting each one. She said it was how the therapists had taught her.

It was a revelation to me, that I could actually take her down there. I've been doing this almost two years and haven't figured half of it out.

Her medicare-paid therapy has ended, as the therapists determined she was not making "sufficient progress." To me this sounds like a decision based on money, not on her actual needs. Whether or not she's making progress, she likes and needs the exercise, and if she didn't so something, she'd lose the ability to do anything.

This is why Debbie, her private aide, is important. We have her coming now five mornings a week, and she takes her down there, or to the gym, and has her ride the "sit/bike" and play ball. It makes all the difference. She comes M-F, and when she didn't come yesterday, Saturday, Mom called to ask me where she was. It's the weekends that feel long.

I took her to chapel today, and to brunch in the Bistro. She doesn't say so, but I know she would like to sit at the big 10-person table, where the high-functioning conversationalists hold forth. I'm more on the, um, antisocial side, and would just as soon eat alone, so we sat near the big table, at a little two-person table by ourselves. Later, Julie joined us, which drew us closer to a respectable gathering.

"I feel like a don't fit in," she said. And when we were done, she made me wheel her around to random people to greet them and introduce me, for the umpty-umpth time.

Leaving her early in the day, close to 1 p.m., is always tough. We brought her to the upstairs dining room, where her friends were, but she said she wanted to lay down, which raised the specter of sitting with her till she was asleep, lest she get up and try to walk  -- and we saw how well that worked last time. But Rose, the greatest nurse in Milwaukee, said she'd take care of it, and we left unruffled.