starting again
2 minute read
you’re going home
John had been in a hospital room and bed for 20 days when the panel of doctors, nurses and therapists felt that he should start preparing to be discharged. It was a Friday when they concluded that he was recovered enough to leave this acute-care level of therapy and come on an outpatient basis. He wouldn’t get this taste of freedom until Monday, but at least he had something to look forward to as the weekends were the longest and most boring with only one or two sessions versus 3 per day. There was, however, a very sweet occupational therapist who was the most approachable and empathetic of the team and she took John for a walk outside around the grounds of the hospital. That doesn’t sound terribly exciting but he hadn’t breathed fresh outdoor air since his overdose other than when we transferred him, which he didn’t even remember. That walk was the first time it really, really hit me that John was going to be on his own, without medical supervision, very soon.
None of the resources we’d contacted seemed to make sense for John so the plan was coming home with me where he’d continue to recover and do outpatient physical therapy three days per week. I was terrified of this arrangement but his dad had to get back to work in California and there were no other options. At this point John could walk at a slow pace and his short term memory seemed to be almost 100% intact. He was able to get dressed and eat on his own, shower, use the toilet and read and write. This was all astounding to us given the fact that he’d been basically dead just 3 weeks earlier. To help make the last days in the hospital go faster John’s cousin came to visit from Portland and she was able to get him talking and cheered up a little bit. I was still worried though about his depressed mood and the psychiatrist from the unit said that was very normal for people with traumatic head injury - that and sleep problems. Good to know.
Monday finally arrived and after a flurry of paperwork and visits by therapists for final words of wisdom we wheeled John down the hallway to the elevators where he’d attempted to flee on day 1 here, and out to the circular drive which was its own level of chaos with patients coming and going in cars, taxi’s, ambulances and vans. I was shaking and my heart was racing as John got in my car and we started on the short trip to my house. The feeling reminded me of the day 19 years earlier when we brought him home from the hospital after being born - you can’t actually believe any sane medical professional would allow you to take this fragile being out the door, put them into a vehicle and just bring them into your home! No training, no manual, no app to help guide you through the mystery that sits in front of you. This was more terrifying than dealing with a newborn for sure.
We’d reconfigured our home office as a bedroom for John since it was on the main floor of the house and he hadn’t attempted stairs yet. A few hours after getting “home” he asked to use my phone (his thankfully had disappeared in the chaos of the second overdose) and every while fiber in my body told me to try and keep him as isolated as possible from the world, I knew that would be a useless battle. I was relieved to hear him calling the girl who’d contacted me the night he OD’d, who said she was his girlfriend. I could hear through his side of the conversation that she hadn’t known whether he’d lived or not - he just kept saying “I’m alive! I lived! Stop crying!” over and over. I knew there were a lot of people who were wondering the same thing because we’d kept John’s status to a very small circle of our closest friends and family with the request that friends not even tell their kids if they were from our neighborhood. Amazingly, the biggest threat to our son’s safety at this point wasn’t medical, it was the group of people he’d been sucked into who would gladly hand him a pill the moment they saw him. And that would almost guarantee his death - despite the heroic effort he’d made to live over the past 3 weeks.
This frightening dance with friends and the unknown physical and emotional impact of the overdose held it’s grip on the whole family - suddenly this was all happening in our house, not in the safe bubble of a hospital, but moment by moment, every single day. And every day John’s dad, my husband and I kept searching and digging and praying that we would find somewhere safe, supportive and healthy for this at-risk young man to go, somewhere he could heal and rebuild his life without the distraction of everyone at home who would pull him down, possibly further than he’d be able to come back from.