The next time I awoke, it was with a wet diaper as I had known I would. I lay in my crib quietly, resolving to wait patiently for my nurse to check my diaper rather than sink further into infantile behavior. I realized that my howls of displeasure hadn’t done me any good, they had only served to make me look immature and justify treating me like a baby. If I had behaved myself, I could have had the use of a bedpan and maintained a little dignity. But since I had shown them I was incapable of deporting myself in an adult fashion, they had diapered me for the duration of my stay and confined me to a baby crib.
By the end of the week, my toilet training was almost gone. They had continued to feed me baby food and formula throughout my stay. The doctor came in a talked to me for a little while on the day before I was released. He told me that I would have to have assistance until I learned how to take care of myself and suggested that I should either go to live with a relative who could take care of me, or I should hire a live-in caretaker. One way or the other, he pointed out, I was unfit to take care of myself. It wasn’t just that I was incontinent and couldn’t feed myself, the tests had shown that I was becoming progressively more forgetful and emotionally unable to cope with the rigors of adult existence. He told me that my reflexes and control over my muscles weren’t improving as he had expected and there was every indication that it might become more difficult to walk in the near future. In short, I needed a full time caregiver to take care of me. He asked if I had any relatives that might be willing to take me in on a permanent basis and I told him about my sister Gina. I gave him Gina’s phone number and he agreed to call her for me and explain the problem. He told me that I shouldn’t have to worry about getting supporting myself and receiving disability, he said that barring paralysis, my impairment was about as total a disability as he’d ever seen. When he left I cried myself to sleep. I couldn’t bear the thought of being cared for by my baby sister, Gina.
Later that night, Gina called the nurse’s station and asked to speak to me. They told her I was asleep and she explained that she was my sister. She told them that my doctor had called her and asked if she could take care of me. She told the nurses that she had told my doctor that she’d be happy to take care of me. She called that evening to arrange to pick me up the next day. One of the nurses came to get me so I could take her call. Rather than take the time to help me totter to the nurse’s station, she picked me up and carried me on her hip. When we got there, she held me against her side with one hand while she held the phone receiver to my ear with the other. I was forced to listen to my sister’s sympathetic gushes while being held like a toddler. When her chatter died down, I agreed to let her take me home to live with her. The nurse hung up the phone and took me back to my crib to go back to sleep. Being treated like a baby while I was at the hospital was bad enough, I wasn’t sure how I would react to the way my sister was going to treat me.