From place to place....following my heart surgery in Aught-Five, I was laid up in successive nursing homes for eight months, while I learned how to walk again, eventually ditching the wheel chair, and to digest non-feeding-tubed solid food, and regain control of my bladder and bowels. Appetite, willingness to undertake physical therapy, all shot. Mood, though Dee visited me daily, terrible.
Then a psychiatrist visited me in my room - the nicely furnished room with the floral wallpaper border at the ceiling that I imagined consisted of rats chasing each other by the tails. The Dr. said he could prescribe something for me that would bring me out of the funk. I was until then resigned to being a well-cared-for nursing home vegetable.
My wife's daily visits kept my spirits from failing. Some others manifested, too, the 'I was sick, and you visited me' stricture.
The meds and personal bolsters worked, and here I am, free of the meds for a couple of years now. Very close to sane, as well, by SRN standards.
Also, during that long incarceration I was given a lap-robe by a traveling Salvation Army worker, going door to door in this home and presumably others, handing-out warmth. I was out of it at the time, but Dee told me where it came from.
I wear this small blanket over my shoulders now, like a cape. I keep it on with a simple clothes-pin. It reminds me of the days when I would leap as a kid from chair to chair pretending to be Superman, airborne.
I am a believer in omens and portents. My warm shoulders do not shrug when I write of this.
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Very glad am I to be able to again don my Russell moccasins, shoes that gathered dust in the closet while I climbed my way back to them. Back from the eventually be-walkered, then caned, corridors to and from the physical therapy gym at my final 'up and out', Waukesha Springs convalescent center.
Yesterday I pulled up on the computer the Russell catalog to order one for a friend, recommending if she were only to have one pair, try the illustrated "Oneida'.
- The Russell Oneida -All I'm going to say on the subject,
or as they say in the Latin: DIXI
