Freewheeling

It’s no secret that I spent a good portion of last summer in the hospital. I blogged about it quite regularly.

But there are a few good hospital tales that I’ve yet to tell, and recently I’ve been thinking back to my very entertaining wheelchair outings. These almost daily, and sometimes twice daily, outings quite literally kept me sane.

And tan, I might add.

Don’t believe me?

Well just look at this. It was taken less than an hour before they carved me open and extracted little miss C -- 41 days after my hospital admission. Not bad.

So yay for wheelchairs, I say!

And although I had been in a wheelchair before – the other two times I gave birth, and during two earlier and blessedly briefer hospital admissions during this most recent pregnancy – I was no pro. I could not do wheelies, or jump up and down, or go up stairs, or anything really cool. Hell, I didn’t even really know how to operate a wheelchair.

My first outing in June is a case in point:



Look at my poor head leave the screen! Thank god for my helpful husband children!

I did manage to master the breaking function of the various wheelchairs I borrowed, but not much else. But seeing as I had to be wheeled around by someone else in order to leave the antenatal wing, I didn’t need to pay that much attention, I always had a driver.

But one day this lack of attention caused a bit of a problem.

My husband and I wheeled over to Letty’s Bean Shack for lunch (the only real option for food besides the hospital cafeteria) as we often did. We parked the wheelchair and ordered our lunch. We ate, and talked, and soaked up every bit of the fresh air and sunshine.

When I knew it’d been way longer than my allotted 30-minute sojourn time, I insisted that we head back up to my room.

I hauled my ever widening ass out of the plastic seat and started toward the exit. I waddled down the few steps and out the gate. But, but, where the hell was the wheelchair?

It was gone! Nowhere to be found. We looked up the street, we looked down the street, not there. We then crossed the street to see if someone had just wheeled it back to the hospital entrance – still no luck.

Shit, we lost the wheelchair! Wtf? How the hell are we going to get me back in my room without any of the nurses noticing? (My room was directly in front of the nurses’ station.)

Quietly, that’s how.

We calmly exited the elevator, walked silently past the nurses’ station, and very quickly into my room. Clicking the door shut behind us as fast as possible.

No one ever asked about it.

And we never said a word.