Coming Home from the Hospital--Now What?

After I was released from the emergency room, I was elated because I didn't want to spend the night at the hospital.  I couldn't wait to get back home and sit in our backyard to watch our bluebird family eat out of their special feeding box.  When my husband helped get me out of the car, I faced my biggest hurdle: I couldn't climb the porch steps without excruciating pain: I had just fractured my pelvis 5 hours before, after all. We tried several different ways to get me up on the porch. I refused to let my husband carry me; we are both 65 and he has a bad back. We weren't exactly the 20-year-old bride and groom we once were.  It was all going to come down to me sucking up the pain and trying to use my good leg to climb up the steps.

It took about a half an hour for me to finally make it up to the porch. Then, I needed to figure out a way to climb over the threshold of the front door using the walker.  It sounds like such an easy task, doesn't it?  We cross the threshold all the time, without even thinking about it.

Lesson learned:

We needed to rent a wheelchair ramp and wheelchair as soon as possible. Otherwise, I was going to be a prisoner in my own house.

My next obstacle that first night was how to sit on the toilet without pain when nature called. When you have a fractured pelvis, it's very difficult to sit down and then stand up from the toilet. We found it best to use the walker to get to the toilet, and then grab the handles and sit slowly down.  It hurt--really badly.

Lesson learned:

We needed to get a portable raised toilet seat so the seat was at a level where it was closer to the handles of the walker.  We tried two toilet seats.  

This one from Wallgreens: I found it to be too wobbly.  

So we ordered another chair:

I liked this one much better because of the raised handles; I didn't feel as if I was falling down into an abyss when I tried to sit down, as I had before.

One thing I must warn you about though with both chairs: you cannot wipe yourself off with toilet paper when you're sitting down, as you usually do. Because of the handle design, you can't spread your legs after you go number 1 or number 2.  You have to do this standing up. It's very awkward and you feel like you're not getting yourself clean enough.  I found that when I needed to go number 2, I had to take off the raised chair and sit on the toilet seat the old-fashioned way.

If you fracture your hip or pelvis like I did, you find yourself ordering a lot of home medical supplies. You must suck it up and buy them; otherwise, you'll have to be in a rehabilitation hospital using all of their stuff--and who wants to do that?