Moving on

The progress I have made through my recent therapy sessions is remarkable to me and almost incomprehensible to my nursing team. It has been a tremendous and terrifying experience to be here in rehab, and now it's time to go home.

Rehab has also been my first taster of being a 'disabled' person. Compared to many of the patients here, my disabilities are minimal and, hopefully, temporary; but I have had glimpses into what it means to be seen as a disabled person rather than as a 'Zoe':
- riding in a wheelchair, I have watched people speak over my head as though I am not fully present in the room, or they have drifted away in the middle of our conversation and I haven't known because I can't turn my neck to look at them.
- I move with obvious awkwardness at the moment, and strangers have tried to second guess what I might need without asking - because they obviously know best because they're normal, right? It has seemed as though they are afraid to speak to me because they don't know what might happen next - how upsetting it would be for them if I was to have, say, a speech impediment or a mental disability!
- I have been laughed at in the cafe for spilling food down myself and found myself playing the clown as a way of minimizing my embarrassment.
- When I was unable to find a bag in my room, a volunteer told me I was probably hallucinating because of my pain meds (I'm not on any pain meds, but sadly didn't have enough nous to ask her about her own drug regimen).
- I have been stripped and dressed by male and female nurses enough times to no longer have any modesty: my body has become some kind of medical anomaly rather than something which belongs intimately and beautifully to myself alone.

I am glad I came to rehab. I've had the opportunity to work intensively with occupational and physical therapists for 3 hours a day, and I have had a room of my own where I have been sleeping for 15 hours a day. I've been well-fed and struck up some wonderful friendships, particularly with the hospital rector who pops by almost daily to chat with me about libraries, and his work in Palestine, and a trip to England he took back in the 1970s. Thanks to technology, I have been able to skype family and friends and read all the wonderful messages people have posted and emailed to me since the accident. I have worked my body until it is so tired I have cried, and then I've woken up the next morning ready to do the same again. (But let's keep a sense of perspective: I'm bench-pressing a walking stick rather than weights; walking up and down stairs rather than sprinting on a beach; trying to pick up a coin with my fingers rather than glorifying in some challenging new yoga pose.)

The activities have been good, but this is a surreal new world. Until yesterday I was not allowed out of my room unsupervised and - never having been good at asking for help - I spent long hours standing by my door listening to the sounds of the ward. There is one nurse who has not needed to visit me. She works with the badly disabled patients. She speaks in a loud, slow, patronizing voice which rings down the corridor, like a melody played over the top of all the television channels blasting from patients' rooms. I am sure she is very good at her job, and I don't doubt she provides a service I could not do well, but I cringe as I hear her speaking about bowel movements and the color of pee in the same tone that well-meaning grown-ups sometimes use with very small children. Perhaps her approach is necessary when a person's mind has been affected by their accident; perhaps she has wonderful successes with patients who would otherwise become constipated and dehydrated. But I can only think that, a few weeks ago, the person she's now speaking to used to be like you, like me, like everybody else. Then a few of us fell down stairs, or fell off motorbikes, or were felled by strokes or brain hemorrhages. We're all struggling with that: everyone here is in pain, caught up in a complex mix of thankfulness at being alive and mourning for the loss of how their lives used to be. Some of the people here will never walk again or live independent lives. And the lesson for me, having had the privilege of this insider's view, is that we're still like you, like me, like everybody else. It's just the rest of the world which sees us differently.