Coorabel Adult Rehabilitation Service or CARS, was the name of the building that I was sent to after the RNSH.Many of the buildings in the rehab complex, are considered to be unsafe because of asbestos, making these older ones a liability. It has been decided pull some of them down and new ones are being built as I write, but some of these 'old ladies' will live on in my memory until I die.
The routine that I had to follow was one that stands in good stead, so, I will take you through it starting off when the hospital 'woke up' for the day.
A lovely older nurse would come to wake me up early in the morning about 6.30 and it was ascertained how I appeared to be or as I came to know the ropes, how I planned to be that day! If I had had little sleep that night, I was fractious and weepy but 'no, no, no, this isn't good', so, generally, it was better to go along with the nurse as she said (in her sing song voice) 'how are we today, we are going to have a lovely breakfast this morning' (no we're not, we are going to have that horrid mush we had yesterday, and the day before and the day before that!!!) and she sat me up, and held onto me, while she manage to get slippers and a dressing gown on me, then she would somehow get me seated in the wheelchair and push me into the dining room, (that was nearly filled with all manner of broken people) around 7 o'clock and place me at 'my table' with a few others. This was supposed to help us to 'socialise' with one another???
We all tried to smile at each other in our lopsided way or nodded or mumbled 'blahblah' and finally when we were finished as much of the food we could manage, (more went on us, than into us!) we shuffled or in my case, were pushed in the wheelchair back to my room and the morning really began.
The morning meds came next and then the very embarrassing 'showering routine' which I got used to quite quickly. After I was undressed by another lovely nurse, she would push me into (my own) the bathroom and into the shower recess (the wet chair was used in this case), she would don a 'wetsuit' type of apron and macintosh shoes that prevented her from getting as wet as I was!! Then she would hop into the shower recess with me, where she took hold of the shower hose and then played the shower all over me and then she would have to hang it up and wash me little by little, then get the shower hose again and play it all over which ever piece she was washing, then hang it up again and then finally after playing the shower over me again, she would have to dry me, which wasn't very easy, as I would flop to the left or right every time she wanted to get hold of my knickers or bra or whatever, but after 50-60 minutes, (when I was exhausted) I was finally ready to face the day.
Can you imagine being the nurses and having to do that for 30 people every day, and that was just in Coorabel!!! The Spinal Injuries Unit and the Brain Injuries Unit had a lot people as well as Coorabel, so getting the lot of us broken people ready for the day, took a really, really long time.
It was 9am, time for Amanda and speech therapy. I was not a happy vegemite at this stage, I can assure you. I had worked with my voice for most of my life as a DJ, compere, voiceover artist and actress, now not to be able to make any kind of credible speech was just overwhelming for me, I thought I would rather be mute than to make the horrible sound that was coming out of my mouth, I was speaking in fits and starts and I sounded like a cockatoo - hideous!
Amanda had such a way with her that I did want to please her, she was so understanding and knew that I was grieving for my voice, which once, only a couple of weeks ago, used to be warm and inviting. Amanda spent her time coaxing some kind of voice out of me, little by little over weeks, there was something we could work with at last, it was certainly no where near what you would actually call a voice, I sounded more like a robot, but with a couple of words, I was actually speaking!
The next thing on the roster was physiotherapy, were I met someone who still works with me occasionally and that is Philip, (a most wonderful, patient and caring man, someone I have been blessed with, and who now works with his patients in their own home) he was not the first physio that I worked with, but definitely the most successful. Physio was a horrid thing, it was unrelenting, it hurt, I cursed everyone and then cried again, but it is something that they know has to be undertaken as soon as possible to get the most out of a person who has had a major stroke - I was one of those people.
After a couple of weeks, I was getting ready to start trying to walk and that was a whole different kettle of fish! The physios' strapped a light weight belt on the me, (it had handholds along the edge of it so that they could hold me as we tried to walk) off we went - me straight down in the chair again! We did this many, many times and I couldn't work out why I couldn't walk - the first and hardest thing that I had to learn now, was that nothing made sense - I had a brain injury.
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