ROOM 21 | Rowan Jeffrey
Picture yourself at a family gathering, a birthday celebration with a meal and cake, followed by an evening of wine and memories, trawling through photograph albums, laughing about family escapades. Warm and replete, you slip into bed, wrap yourself around your wife’s familiar softness and drift into a comfortable sleep.
You wake at 5am needing the bathroom. But when you stand, inexplicably you’re on the floor. You try to get up, but your body won’t cooperate. Your dominant hand doesn’t seem to work. And your leg won’t take weight. You’re still trying to get your head around this when your wife, woken by the crash, comes to help. You’re both confused, still groggy with sleep - what on earth is happening?
When the ambulance arrives you undergo a battery of tests that are repeated several times in the hospital before it’s confirmed – a stroke. People have strokes all the time and recover - you know some of them. You’re shocked but confident you’ll be back home soon, picking up the reins of daily life.
In the stroke rehab ward, you work hard on your walking and arm exercises, learning to feed yourself and undertake daily activities with your non-dominant hand. Being toileted is humiliating, but it’s not forever. Your physios are encouraging, challenging you to stretch yourself. And thankfully you have speech, and family support, unlike others you meet. Through noisy wakeful nights you visualise returning to your house and the adjustments needed to accommodate your (hopefully temporary) walking frame. You miss your wife, physical closeness; you miss home.
Five weeks into rehab, the ward staff call a family meeting. You sit in your new wheelchair looking from face to face, bewildered. What are they saying? “Sorry to say” mumble, mumble,“…not making progress…” mumble, mumble,“… can’t go home…” mumble, mumble,“… hospital-level care…” The words are swallowed by the churning in your head. Everyone is looking at you, or not looking, trying to hide their shock and tears. “Do you understand?” Do you?
Four days later you sit, alone in the empty ward dining room, your personal possessions hanging in a plastic shopping bag from the wheelchair handle. You wait and wait. The nurses needed your room but forgot to contact your family who must take you to your new hospital room in a retirement village. Things weren’t supposed to happen this way. Those places – prisons - always made you shudder.
You glare at your arm, that reliable tool of decades, turned traitor as it jerks unpredictably, angrily, the hand refusing to grip. A food-stained protective sleeve covers your bruises but can’t prevent you seeing the ones it inadvertently inflicts on others. Damaged, the arm has more power than ever, but so little of it is within your control. You see more clearly now; the stroke was only the first wave. While you were distracted by recovery, an ocean of wild water was silently gathering … and now you will be washed away.
In your new “home,” few residents can hold a coherent conversation. Some use walking frames, but most lie on beds or reclining chairs, in a lounge facing a large TV screen. The routine is unswerving: breakfast, exercises, morning tea, physio if you’re lucky, activities, lunch, videos or music, the occasional visiting performer. The activities coordinator is relentlessly cheerful but struggles to garner interest. Some residents sleep, some shift restlessly, while others call out: “help me, help me” or “I really shouldn’t be here” as they snatch at random arms. Grey frail women clutch babies with plastic faces while the few men sit impassive. Food for the bedridden is delivered by spoon or sippy cup. Visitors are sparse, their every move tracked by a synchrony of hungry eyes.
While your room allows respite, you’re never safely alone. The door might burst open, day or night, as carers come to shower you, return laundry, or bring medication. Some knock, others barge, speaking in cheery voices: “how are we today? Good, good.” Day after day, you wonder what happened and what you did to deserve it. You ask your wife: “why did you ring the ambulance?”
At night you lie rigid, trying to interpret the noises in the corridor, voices, constant door-banging, clatter of equipment. Is something wrong? Are they talking about you? Is someone coming to hurt you? How do you know they are staff? What if that strange man from the dining room - the Beast - is trying to break into your room? You can’t even see the door.
Other times you wake, drenched in sweat, unsure where you are. Your eyes register the orange light under the door, the moonlit gap in the curtains the carer didn’t quite close, the iPad that contains all your secret notes… and you remember. Your unruly arm is wedged in the bed-edge and won’t move, so you yank it, hard. The deep bruising from shoulder to elbow changes from red, to purple, to green, to yellow over the next two weeks. Your family try to wrap themselves around you, to comfort, cheer, console you, but it’s not enough. Your dreams are dark and terrifying.
You ring the call-bell because you need to use the toilet, but the night carers are unimpressed. Unwilling to take you to the ensuite, they offer a bottle. Your useless arm knocks it and urine spills. Your bed needs to be changed.
Now it’s scary to ring, scary to be left for long periods when you do ring, scary to risk wetting the bed. They say: “you need to use continence pads, it’s better for you, more convenient, more hygienic.” You resist, your family resists, incensed that you should wear nappies when you have bladder control. But they are not there in the long, long nights, dealing with the bell, the forbidding staff, the fear of not holding on until someone comes.
So you wear the pads. You stare at the ceiling, make lame jokes with the carers, not wanting to see them put on. Yet still, when you ring the bell because the pad is wet, they say “wait, it isn’t full - we won’t change it until at least 5am” and you lie in your own urine, awake and desolate.
As your visitors thin and days become months, your wife says “I know it’s hard, but we’ve had a good life together. Let’s look at the positives, make the most of what we have.” You look closely at the familiar face and wonder, what is left? You’re grateful for the care, and company, but it isn’t what you had, and it isn’t what you want. Are you still loved? In this state? Would it be better if you weren’t here, causing work and grief? What do you have to offer? And your children, where are they? Too busy? With kids? Dogs? Jobs? They come, but never enough. So many hours alone. So many hours to think.
You consider the old you: useful, strong, everybody’s fix-it person. You think of all you achieved with your wife, the children you raised, the homes you created, the fights and triumphs as you renovated the bathroom and built the back deck. The travel adventures, the marathons, the cycling trips and the back-country tramping you enjoyed for years. You remember the feel of the pack on your back and the pull of the current as you crossed mountain streams, the time you nearly drowned when your backpack was caught by a log, the time when the rivers were too high and you both slept in the pounding rain under a single emergency blanket. The camaraderie with hunters, tourists, fellow hut-dwellers: shared food, laughter and survival tips. The curious thieving parrots, the majestic falcons soaring sunward. The snow-dusted ridges, clear night skies, and the pure joy of sleeping beneath them. New Year’s Eve celebrated in the mountains? No better place to be.
Your bedroom opens to a courtyard with a fountain and a garden of roses. It’s pretty enough but rarely used. You can’t get out there and the sun is so bright you keep the curtains closed to avoid over-heating. Your walls are beige, punctuated with family photos and one of you, at 70, finishing a marathon. The carers don’t believe it was you. They don’t believe much you say, like the time you told them you were going out for a birthday lunch, and they made you eat in the dining room beforehand. Or the many times you explained your hand can’t grip and they got angry when it slipped off the walker. Or the time you told them you felt dizzy, but they left you alone on the toilet far too long, and you cracked your head on the floor when you fell.
It’s easier now just to nod, smile, do what they want. Stick to the rules, follow the timetable. Even when your wife gets angry, when your son visits from overseas, when your daughter organises a lunch outing, or your friends invite you to a celebration. Breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 12, tea at 5, bed at 6.30. Don’t deviate. Don’t make a fuss. Take your meds. That’s how things work best here.
Yet, eyes tight, late at night, you remember you. You visualise yourself, somehow, climbing to the roof, towering above the village buildings, the empty bowling green, the deceptively pretty gardens, the unseeing carers and visitors who walk the tidy paths. You balance on the precipice, raising your feeble bruised arms to the heavens, then with one deep hearty breath, launch yourself into flight, feet tailward, wings wide and handsome as a fearsome falcon dominating the wild sky. No one ever asks a falcon why.
Rowan Jeffrey, PhD is an educator of thirty plus years. She enjoys working with adults who need additional support to achieve their educational goals, and currently manages a Learning Services team of 13 advisors at Ara Institute of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. An advanced psychodrama trainee, she has had poetry published in the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Psychodrama Association Journal (AANZPA Journal). Her experiences as the daughter of a man who hated every minute of his years in long-term care sparked her into a post-graduate Diploma in Health Sciences and creative writing as a means to process strong emotions, particularly poetry and short fiction that explores the psychodrama of life.