Changing Shells

Since my parents and family wanted the best chance of my recovery, they began searching for the best Rehab facilities in the area. Due to my age this would become quite the challenge. Most places near my general area had an age requirement of 16. But you guessed it I was 15 and a half. When almost all avenues were exhausted, they found my new destination roughly an hour to an hour and a half away in Boston at a large Rehab facility. Now it’s moving day for me. I can’t really say the departure was quite as memorable as the destination. I guess a good way to put it into perspective would be to imagine what a growing hermit crab feels like when they have to move to a bigger shell.   I say that because at the time, that’s what it felt like to a young 15-year-old boy, a shell. My memory of getting moved into the back of my transport ambulance is not very clear, but I can remember the moment the rear doors opened to bring me out and into the facility. It was a brisk fall day with the strongest wind I could’ve imagined at that moment. I’d like to think it was a metaphor for God, fate, mother nature, whoever and whatever trying to push me further into my journey to recovery with their strong force from the gusts of wind chilling me to the bone. 

I know it’s hard to believe, but the very first encounter I had with any of my new nurses and therapists was having 5 people try to hold me up straight to have me sit up on the edge of a bed to greet me. My head was hard to hold up for any length of time obviously because my core strength was gone by this point if you couldn’t guess. This is the beginning of the various assessments to gauge where I’m at physically and mentally. It’s sad to say, but there was quite a disparity between the other kids and myself in my ward of the facility I was going to be staying in. If you have ever seen “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, you can get a sense of the company I had around me. Now with that being said I was older for the floor and too young to be a patient up on the adult floors and that made it hard to connect with just about anybody except some choice staff of nurses, aides, and therapists.