Awakening Redux I, The Thin Edge of Dignity

Awakening Redux I, by Dick Weinman, The Thin Edge of Dignity

“Darkness shows through the windows, a few stars flicker, the moon is a lighted roundness, an orange haze circles the top of the street light.”

Those were the opening words of the second blog I wrote about my life in an Assisted Living Facility (ALF). “Rise and Shine: Waking at the ALF” was posted in the fall of 2013; however, I entered the ALF in 2006. At the time, I was so overwhelmed by its strangeness; how different it was from any living experience I’d experienced, especially my home of forty years, including my years as a kid at summer camp.

I faced my new life of dependence with awe and wonder. It has taken me seven years after I passed through my days of wonder, to look at the events of my life with an observer’s eye. Skepticism had set in. So in 2013, I was just beginning to post my bi-monthly blogs on AARP.org. I began with a literal and metaphorical AWAKENING.

The “darkness . . . ““stars”. . . and “moon” of the long ago winter morning are gone; now - in the summer of 2015, I still wake to the morning sky, but yellow rays of sun slip through the thin line separating the single strips of blinds. As I write, it is Pacific Daylight Time. However, I still look “through fuzzy eye lids . . . awake, yet asleep, gazing over my shoulder out the window.” And I still “turn my head toward the digital clock on the nightstand, and try to decide if I should get up.

After living in the ALF for nine years, certain processes fall into place. Each has its own ritual, sometimes an expression of my needs, my wants, or the institution’s expediency. They are the rituals of living in assisted living. I call it, The Thin Edge of Dignity.

Now that I’ve progressed in my abilities, whoever the caregiver is any morning, she doesn’t have to remove my hand braces. I’ve removed them, or the caregiver on the all-night shift has, hours before.

(I have a brace for each arm, extending from my finger tips, covering my palms and extending up my forearm. The sides of the brace are held together by 2” wide straps of cotton fastened with Velcro strips. A narrower strap crosses the knuckles of each hand. The reason for this overnight hand and arm coffin is to straighten the damaged tendons in my arm and to prevent my fingers from curling fist-like into my palm. You can find out the cause of all this therapeutic activity and more in the first blog in this series.)

From here-on-in in the morning ritual, nothing much has changed since 2013. If you haven’t read that early post, continue. If you have, maybe you’d like to read it again for a brief review of events. If not, feel free to browse. The first blog, September 3, 2013, is a good introduction to the many that follow.

Since I began writing, I’ve come a long way in my physical abilities. I don’t need help getting up, although it takes my quadriceps, gluts, and calf muscles to rise from my mechanical “hospital type” Tempurpedic bed. With the head and feet raised, I’m stuck in the gulch between them. Exerting my biceps and triceps in conjunction with the leg muscles, I push to a standing position; then slowly walk backwards until I feel the seat of the wheelchair, parked at the foot of the bed.

As I drop into the chair, I – even after all these years . . . “Who will it be this morning?” “Which caregiver will start my day?”

Sometimes I have a long wait to find out, sometimes help comes so fast, I don’t even get a chance to get to the bathroom and brush out my bed head and look respectable. (Hmmm, what do these invaders of the waking hour expect?) I may not even have time for a quick swish of mouth wash – aah! – to smell respectable.

Assuming a normal wake up wait – Let me deconstruct the new me preparing for the day.

I get out of bed – unaided. I make it into my wheel chair, I use my feet to paddle into the bathroom. If I didn’t have a chance earlier, I brush my hair, use my mouth wash, roll my wheelchair over to the MAC, and see what NOAA says about the kind of weather it’ll be this week, and what Yahoo chooses for me as the news of the morning.

She’s still not here. The words I read on the screen are now just words – I’ve lost my concentration on the news stories. I squirm as my bladder gets angry. “Please get here,” I beg to the air. The need to go intensifies. If my legs hadn’t been damaged in the traffic accident, I’d cross them. I squirm. Thank goodness I sleep in Depends.

Who will come to my aid this morning? One of the many part-time Oregon State University undergraduate girls? A forty-fiftyish full time staffer? The person who just tolerates me? The person for whom I’m a confidant? The person who likes me – or doesn’t? The person who respects me? The person who has no clue as to what she’s supposed to do? Is the full shift here? Are we short-staffed? How long will I have to wait?

I hallucinate her entrance: in she’ll bound – or slink – depending upon the night before: is it the Friday after “Thirsty Thursday?” (An Oregon State University ritual for college students to drink and sleep elsewhere than home.) Or the Tuesday after “Margarita Monday?” Or any Saturday or Sunday when the facility is short staffed? Or, God forbid, the Sunday after a football victory?

Where is her knock?

Finally!

Each caregiver has her own distinctive knock. I identify my caregiver auditorily because I’m usually looking at the computer screen as she knocks and enters behind me – my back is to the door. If the rhythm is dum-didi-dum-dum-dum-dum, I know immediately who it is - Pam. She’s friendly and “with it” – and I’m glad she’s at the door. If there’s a shortened rhythm – dum-dum-di-dum – it’s Angie, and I’m a little apprehensive; she’s a little forced joyful – I’m uncertain. If there are three straight knock-knock-knocks, I know this is Meg, the “let’s just move along” caregiver. I’m ready to follow orders.

The door gently eases open – or tosses back suddenly – depending on who it is. Regardless of the differences in knocks, the Good Morning! remains the same. It seems to be the “morning mantra” for geriatrics. Why are old people considered children by the millennials? Gooooddd moorrning! an ascendancy of singing how gooooodd it is and how wooooonderful that it’s morning (and you made it through the night.) Is it retribution for how we spoke to our children as we pinched their cheeks, wiggled their skin, “kootchie cooed” them with a smile and false falsetto?

But they mean well. No one wants to wake up to a grouchy “whaddyawant?” Our culture equates old age with feebleness and illness – and the need for babying. Many college age young adults act like parents. After all we wore diapers when we were babies; we wear Depends when we are old. Contemporary Western culture’s attitude toward old age is well expressed by William Shakespeare, as he ends his famous Seven Ages of Man soliloquy, the melancholy character, Jacques, laments that we began as a “mewling, puking baby,” and we end, after a life of manhood and maturity, “in second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

...... look for the second part of Awakening Redux next week.....