So what's What's the Routine Here?

Revellie blows at 6 am.  One of the thousand questions they asked me yesterday was what time do I like to wake up and my answer was 8. No respect.  I have to get up, get dressed and to the dining room.  This requires the assistance of Uma, the overnight aide who is also helping 5 other people.  She wheels me to the toilet then I'm on my own.  I manage to get my underwear pulled up by myself and wheel myself to the sink.

Then to the dining room  Breakfast is at 8 but they start serving coffee at about twenty til. I'm put at a table with women this time.  I introduce myself but no one can hear me so after saying Karen about 12 times I gave up.  Our server arrived and looked at me and asked my name.  She didn't have a ticket for me.  Back to the kitchen to find my ticket.  

Breakfast, I soon find is the same every day.  Eggs, either scrambled or over easy, a pre-fabricated cheese omelet, bacon one day, sausage the next, toast and fruit.  Actually not so bad except when you have it for 20 days,  But I have to eat protein so I go with over easy so I can eat the whites before dunking my toast. And last night's soup cart has turned into an oatmeal cart offering up the soupiest oatmeal I've ever seen

After breakfast I'm wheeled back to my room where my roommate is eating a second breakfast from her private stash and watching Let's Make a Deal. They put me back in bed and I check my email.  Sometime around 10 they come to get me for occupational therapy.  I find out that OT is strength building above the waist so they put me on an arm bicycle and I pedal away, My therapist is named Rebecca and she's a sweetheart.  45 minutes of working with weights and stuff,

Then I'm wheeled back to bed and I fall into  a nice sleep until they come to wheel me to lunch  This time I ask to be seated  with s lady who was seated alone.  Turned out to be s lovely lady despite the fact that she was very  deaf and almost blind.  she needed help cutting up her food since they just sort of parked her there and left.  I made sure she was able to eat everything and i flagged down a server to get her a glass of milk.  She told me her name was Bernice and she smiled..

My physical therapist, Jojee came to pick me up and take me for leg work.  This was tough but I powered through.  45 minutes.  They took me back to bed and a wonderful 2-hort nap...or so I thought.  My roommate  had the "fighting shows" on.  I'm trying to sleep with a background  soundtrack of people screaming about baby mamas and owing money until the actual fighting starts. Who knew these shows were on...EVERY AFTERNOON.

Dinner was at 5.  I spotted a table with a lady who looked like she was actually  "with it" and I was right.  I asked why she was there and not in a wheelchair like the rest of us.She told me she had passed out in the back seat of a friend's car,They took her to the ER where they did all the usual tests which were all negative. However, her children freaked out so they moved her here where she was doing therapy she didn't need.

Hmmmmm I smell a scam   

Who I am and why I'm here

I have stress-related anorexia.  I keep saying it over and over. No way.  I used to weigh 300 lbs. I wouldn't know how to be anorexic if you gave me an instruction manual.  Yet here I am in MountainView hospital weighing 118 lbs and so dehydrated they can't get an IV in my arm.  I passed out.  My friend, Annette came with me to the ER.

I hate the hospital because nobody listens to you.  This time, because I mentioned having some nausea and vomiting in the previous weeks they somehow pinned that to this visit and wouldn't let me have any food or water. I was screaming that I was starving and thirsty, the smug nurse practitioner signed off on that. They finally let me have ice chips at1 in the morning.

I stayed there a while trying to eat massive quantities of hospital food when they explained that I would be better served in what they delicately call a "skilled nursing facility"

So this is why I found myself strapped to wheelchair in the back of the van headed to what I like to call Sunny Acres. Sunny acres the kind place you would put your mom if you really hated her.  They put me in a dingy room kind of like a hospital room, but worse.  My roommate grunted at me and went back to watching a TV show where people were  actually beating each other up and pulling out their hair extensions.  I came to learn that would be every day's entertainment in the afternoon.

Then came the questions.  I don't know dozens of them hundreds of them?  All of the same information that got screwed up at the hospital was transferred here, still screwed up.  You know they really should invented a machine where someone can type all your stuff in and it can follow you around wherever you go Maybe they could even have a barcode that they put on your wristband and the nurse is that the new place would just have to scan it. Nah...that's just Star Wars stuff.  What do they think this is, the 21st-century?

Then it was time to eat dinner so they rolled me into the dining room. The dining room was a nice room with a gazebo shaped birdcage which kind of made me sad because it wasn't like they had a parrot in there...Just ordinary New Mexico birds.

There was an open seat at a table with three men so I asked to be put there.I quickly learned that this sort of thing wasn't done at Sunny Acres.  Men sit with men and women sit with women.  I tried to make conversation by asking where everyone was from.  One man could neither hear or talk.  The second, once I told him my name was Karen, said "I had a farm in Africa" to which I answered "at the foot of the Ngong hills. I smiled and said a literary person.But if we have a moment it was just the one, because at that point the third man at the table chimed in or I should say boomed in  because he was extremely loud (double hearing aids will do that).  I used it to live in Detroit, that is until all the damn colored people forced me to sell my house. Had to move to the other side of 8 mile and live with the damn Jews.

Just then our server came around with the soup cart.   I asked what kind of soup it was and she said she didn't know.  One taste told me it was cream of boiled water.  Yum,  I would come to learn that this was a popular selection here.   The entree was called beef burgundy and was a few pieces of beef on a plate of mushy noodles.  Since I'm supposed to eat protein first I picked out the beef and left the noodles. Then there was desert.  Every meal came with a mystery piece of something sweet that we called yellow pie, white pie etc.  It was all too sweet for me,

I flagged down one of the nurse's assistants to push me back to the room.  My roommate was in her bed finishing her dinner.  She took all of her meals in bed.  In fact, I don't recall ever seeing her get out of bed except to go to therapy or to the bathroom.  Then she would hoist herself into her double-wide wheelchair and complain that my wheelchair was blocking her way.

I watched Monday Night Baseball which was how I knew I'd come in on a Monday.  I wished I had a crayon to mark an X on the wall to keep track of my time here.  I was here for 20 days.