The hospital routine never varied, breakfast at eight, lunch at noon and supper was served at six. The various appointments – doctor, speech therapy, personal hygiene, physical therapy, adaptive learning and psychiatry were sandwiched in between. Lights out was at 10 o’clock every night, seven days a week. It seems like it was a lot, and at first it was, but inside a week I was showering without assistance and had managed to transfer from my bed to a wheelchair. I saw the doctors about once a week. That left three hours of adaptive learning, speech therapy and physical therapy every day.

Every night I would leave my wheelchair further away, and stumble and hop my way to bed. Before long I could maneuver myself pretty good using my left side for balance and concentrating on what I had to do with the right leg to get it to move forward. It was slow and painful, not very pretty to look at but it got the job done.

During the day I would practice using the chair, it’s hard to go straight when using only one hand for locomotion… it tends to go in circles, but I managed. After a while I could make it down to the second floor for therapy on my own, without the help of an orderly.

That was a banner day for me because without an escort, I was free to roam the hospital at will and I took advantage of it. I’d load up two or three books in my wheelchair and off I’d go, whenever I got tired of “pushing” the chair, which happened often, I would read. I became a sort of fixture throughout the hospital, from the gift shops and outpatient clinics to the psychiatric ward. I knew every nook and cranny of the hospital, eventually the staff became used to seeing me around and ignored me.