Read Online One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir by Diane Ackerman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Diane Ackerman
Ads: Link
floor and a convenient depot to write orders, gather medications, eye monitors, and await the urgent pinging of bells. All of the patients’ rooms were arranged side by side across a narrow corridor. Walking past open doors, I glimpsed snapshots of humanity in extremis , a surprising range of young and old men and women from many walks of life, all assigned to Rehab’s ill-fated club. During Paul’s physical therapy or in the halls, I sometimes fraternized with fellow residents and their families, learning a little of their stories.
In one room with the door propped open, the sun cast dark shadows against the pale walls, and for a moment a crowd seemed to be excavating something. As the light shifted, I recognized two nurses helping an obese woman back into bed, struggling to lift her huge swollen leg, where at least 100 pounds of fluid pooled. Her lymph system had gone awry, creating floods and blockages, until it took a draft of people to move her. She once told me she was married but her husband rarely visited, and that she preferred life in the unit, where the nurses looked after her, even filing her nails and washing her hair.
Down the hall, a young woman, who had suffered a stroke, dragged her left leg and arm, holding the wall while shuffling with the aid of a physical therapist, who was helping her relearn how to walk. She looked up at me with sunken eyes, chin slanted to one side, her face engraved with sorrow. She spoke rarely, in a thin voice that lisped at a whisper. She reminded me of my next-door neighbor many years ago, a healthy realtor in her thirties, who had suffered a stroke that changed her life forever. Her husband had had a swimming pool installed for her to do therapy in, thus beginning the fashion of pools in the neighborhood. An old backyard pool came with my own small house, and Paul adored swimming, but I never dreamed he would be using it for physical therapy one day as well.
Another resident of Rehab was a young African-American man with shoulder-length dreadlocks. Because of chronic infection exacerbated by his diabetes, one leg had been amputated below the knee. In a flat voice, he told me how nurses cleaned the sutures (staples) with soap and water, then applied the acrid, red-ochre antiseptic, Betadine, which smelled like his mother’s nail-polish remover, and pulled a bandage tightly around the stump, to shrink and mold it for an eventual prosthesis. Most of the time he sat listlessly in a chair, and I heard nurses chiding him for neglecting an ulcer on his remaining foot. I never saw anyone visit him, not family or friends.
Two doors down lived a slender middle-aged woman, who had had a stroke resulting in a devastatingly enfeebled left arm and leg, but her mind seemed untouched, and while I pitied her fate, I admired her resolve. For although her lax limbs made it arduous, she was learning to use a walker without falling, and I sometimes saw her in physical therapy, patiently aided by a therapist, lifting the aluminum frame and inching it forward, step-sliding into the cage with both feet, then inching forward again, all with a deliberate, unhurried slowness, her height rising and falling at each effort. A professor at one of the local colleges, she was often visited by young women, not a family in the traditional sense but a loyal network of friends and students. She told me she spritzed her pillow several times a day with clary sage, to help her relax and keep up her spirits. Passing her room, I’d catch the piquant scent of desert creosote bushes wafting gently through her open door.
A college hockey player occupied another room. His bandaged face fixed in a slight curl, he always looked sickened by a bad smell. His was a particularly sad case, but a terribly common story. One night, after he and some frat mates had been drinking, he had crashed his car on the long, unevenly lit highway edging town. His head stove into the windshield, and soon afterward he arrived at the
In one room with the door propped open, the sun cast dark shadows against the pale walls, and for a moment a crowd seemed to be excavating something. As the light shifted, I recognized two nurses helping an obese woman back into bed, struggling to lift her huge swollen leg, where at least 100 pounds of fluid pooled. Her lymph system had gone awry, creating floods and blockages, until it took a draft of people to move her. She once told me she was married but her husband rarely visited, and that she preferred life in the unit, where the nurses looked after her, even filing her nails and washing her hair.
Down the hall, a young woman, who had suffered a stroke, dragged her left leg and arm, holding the wall while shuffling with the aid of a physical therapist, who was helping her relearn how to walk. She looked up at me with sunken eyes, chin slanted to one side, her face engraved with sorrow. She spoke rarely, in a thin voice that lisped at a whisper. She reminded me of my next-door neighbor many years ago, a healthy realtor in her thirties, who had suffered a stroke that changed her life forever. Her husband had had a swimming pool installed for her to do therapy in, thus beginning the fashion of pools in the neighborhood. An old backyard pool came with my own small house, and Paul adored swimming, but I never dreamed he would be using it for physical therapy one day as well.
Another resident of Rehab was a young African-American man with shoulder-length dreadlocks. Because of chronic infection exacerbated by his diabetes, one leg had been amputated below the knee. In a flat voice, he told me how nurses cleaned the sutures (staples) with soap and water, then applied the acrid, red-ochre antiseptic, Betadine, which smelled like his mother’s nail-polish remover, and pulled a bandage tightly around the stump, to shrink and mold it for an eventual prosthesis. Most of the time he sat listlessly in a chair, and I heard nurses chiding him for neglecting an ulcer on his remaining foot. I never saw anyone visit him, not family or friends.
Two doors down lived a slender middle-aged woman, who had had a stroke resulting in a devastatingly enfeebled left arm and leg, but her mind seemed untouched, and while I pitied her fate, I admired her resolve. For although her lax limbs made it arduous, she was learning to use a walker without falling, and I sometimes saw her in physical therapy, patiently aided by a therapist, lifting the aluminum frame and inching it forward, step-sliding into the cage with both feet, then inching forward again, all with a deliberate, unhurried slowness, her height rising and falling at each effort. A professor at one of the local colleges, she was often visited by young women, not a family in the traditional sense but a loyal network of friends and students. She told me she spritzed her pillow several times a day with clary sage, to help her relax and keep up her spirits. Passing her room, I’d catch the piquant scent of desert creosote bushes wafting gently through her open door.
A college hockey player occupied another room. His bandaged face fixed in a slight curl, he always looked sickened by a bad smell. His was a particularly sad case, but a terribly common story. One night, after he and some frat mates had been drinking, he had crashed his car on the long, unevenly lit highway edging town. His head stove into the windshield, and soon afterward he arrived at the
Similar Books
