I was a spry 81 in Pittsburgh when a stupid accident led to an emergency operation on my stricken knee. I recovered completely from that, though it took some months to get back to normal. I was a considerably creakier 89, by then living in Mexico City, when I was again launched into physical therapy, some of it still ongoing. About today, see a brief account below. But first, the 2008 Post-Gazette oped.
First Person: The 11th floor: Back at home after rehab
Saturday, June 07, 2008
By Rudolph H. Weingartner
Some weeks ago, I walked out of my front door to go to
the bank. Four houses up I caught the bottom of my foot on a piece of
protruding sidewalk and fell hard on my left knee, smashing it pretty badly.
That is how, a week later -- after a tricky operation from which I emerged with
my left leg in a harness, ankle to groin -- I wound up in one of the beds of
the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research on the 11th floor of Montefiore
Hospital.
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Rudolph H. Weingartner is professor emeritus of
philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh (rudywein@pitt.edu). His latest book
is "A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education"
(Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield).
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Magic Mountain it wasn't; this was practical America, not
an upscale Swiss sanatorium in the early years of the last century. But it
nevertheless had something of the enclosed, self-sufficient characteristics of
the establishment Thomas Mann described.
The point of the place, at least as I saw it from my supine
perspective, is to bring people from their handicapped condition -- brought on
by disease, an operation or a traumatic event, such as a stroke or an accident
-- to a state that allows them to function at least semi-independently at home.
Such an enterprise cannot accomplish its tasks without
having its workforce deployed in a systematic way. The need for order is
heightened because the 11th floor is both a rehab establishment and a hospital.
We inmates were both hospital patients and rehab clients.
The rooms are standard hospital rooms, including
motorized beds. But they also sport a small bulletin board on which, each
morning, the patient's schedule for the day is inscribed by a therapy aide
wearing a white shirt or blouse. Indeed, the color or dress coding of the
diversified personnel testifies both to the complexity and the orderliness of
the people who attend to our needs.
The earliest to show up, maybe as soon as 5 a.m., were
nurses' aides, in flowery blouses if women, or in some shade of blue if men,
with "vital signs" the first order of business. Like everyone else,
always friendly, it didn't take them long to determine blood pressure,
temperature, pulse and oxygen level.
Often the physicians came next, even before breakfast, in
long white smocks on which their names were embroidered. The nurse of the day,
wearing some kind of light-colored clothing, came to put a fresh dressing on
the stapled seam across my knee. Medicine was brought by nurse or aide,
accompanied by a laser scanning of my wristband, by way of receipt.
The working day begins at 9, when I was wheeled (and
later self-propelled) either to occupational therapy or to physical therapy.
Aside from the fact that the occupational therapists wore green tops and light
pants and the physical therapists wore blue tops, what is the difference
between these two genres?
Indeed, when I first found out that I would go to
occupational therapy, I was puzzled, since, long retired, I don't have an
occupation. But what "OT" usefully means is activities everyone
engages in at home.
There was just plain standing, on one foot, holding on to
the walker. In that pose, I played checkers and other table games with other
patients until I got too tired to stand. Though I'm not much of a cook at home,
I went through the paces of making a grilled cheese sandwich, rummaging in the
refrigerator and handling a frying pan.
There were also arm-strengthening exercises to compensate
for compromised legs, and there were such useful experiments as determining how
high a seat would have to be for me to be able to get up on it with the aid
only of a walker. Our grandest experiment came when my OT therapist wheeled me
to the front entrance of the hospital, where we found that I could indeed get
into a car.
Physical therapy was more strenuous. Leg exercises, of
course, and walks with the walker. At first that meant hopping on one leg, but
later I was given permission to put down half my body-weight. When I asked the
surgeon how I could gauge that amount, he referred me to physical therapy.
And rightly so. Some clever inventor has devised a gadget
that sent a signal from a special shoe on my left foot to a small receiver that
had been set at 90 pounds. Whenever my left foot touched the ground, an LED
signal showed the number of pounds and a beep would sound censoriously if I
exceeded the permitted weight. I practiced a good deal with that gadget, so as
to get a feel for what was and was not allowed.
A poignant indication that I was in a hospital consisted
of signs everywhere urging hand washing, as well as much-used dispensers of
Purell disinfectant. If its stock is doing well, the product likely is
performing the imperative service of fending off infections.
I'm less convinced that the widespread production of
certain tools, such as the snips that removed my staples, which were declared
single-use in six languages, are much more than opportunistic money-making.
Better multiple-use tools have been available all these years; they need only
to be consigned to an autoclave after each use. It has always been such.
I benefited greatly from my stint on the 11th floor of
Montefiore, a complex and smoothly operating little magic mountain. I am
certainly doing much better at home for having been there. Now I am waiting to
get the harness off my leg so as to take my first hot shower since forever.
First published on June 7, 2008 at 12:00 am
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