A First Step on the Road to Recovery

My cousin and I on one of our excursions
Walking sticks, sensible shoes and sun hats at the ready

After all was said done, signed, sealed and delivered, I was a mess.

I stuttered badly. Getting thoughts and sentences out was difficult to impossible.  Sometimes the words came out all garbled or the wrong words came up.  Once I found myself saying to hubby:  "I just dirtied a banana."  What?????  Translation, the dishes were all clean and I was using a clean knife to cut a banana. For a person who was once an excellent communicator both verbally and written, this was disturbing.

My cognitive skills were drain the drain as well.  My mind was so badly injured that I couldn't follow a recipe ... or read music.   I loved to read but focussing was now a challenge.  I could only read a paragraph or so at a time.

I no longer presented as the once intelligent person I had been known as.

My guess is that my GAF was well before the marker 70 which appears to separate the well from the unwell emotionally.  It was probably somewhere in the 50s.

*****

I've always marched to a "different" drummer.  Some of my methods may not be conventional, but they usually work. They usually work because I know myself very well.  Better than most people know themselves.

 ... I decided to do something that most would consider unorthodox at best; bizarre at worst.

I booked flights to Winston Salem, the place my father grew up and where my mother's family migrated to during the Great Depression.

Why in the world would I do something like that?

Because home is where the heart is?

Because I have many memories from visiting both sets of grandparents there growing up?

Because my best friend who is also my cousin lives there?  Someone who knows me very well - and loves me anyway.

Because I felt safe there?

Somehow I felt that if I made it down there, my mind would start to heal.

The problem was getting down there.

Which with my mind so scrambled was a challenge.  Also, as I was going alone.

The flights were booked; transit to the airport booked.  The day arrived.

I came totally unglued entering the airport and trying to figure out where I was supposed to do which is when I discovered that the airline offers wheelchair assistance.  It was thanks to this wheelchair assistance that I made it through customs and security, to the gate and into the first airplane.  The scenario reversed itself when we landed in Dulles, a massive airport outside Washington D.C., where I was to switch planes.  I was led to someone with a wheelchair who navigated me through the labyrinth of transiting from one terminal to the next.

Whatever works, right?

*****

I made it!  Victory one.

My cousin met me at the airport.  Victory two.

As our visit progressed and she took control of daily things like cooking, driving, etc.,  andI felt more and more relaxed.  The safer I felt, the more relaxed I became and the stuttering ceased.

We used the time to visit places one or both of us knew from our childhoods.  She took me around to the apartment complex our mutual grandparents lived in and the park across the street where we walked around.  Funny, the park seemed small than I remembered as an 11 year old.

Together we went to Reynolda, the old Reynolds estate which is now a museum, where my grandparents migrated to in the 1930''s.  The estate was in the process of being renovated and my grandfather, an architectural draftsman, was hired for part of the restoration.  While there, we saw the house on the (now former) estate where my mother and an uncle lived with their parents that year.  It was built for the Reynolds children to 3/4 scale and was called the Dollhouse or Playhouse - depending on who you talk to.  We were even able to contact the correct people and were allowed to see the inside of the house.

Together, we went outside the city and visited My father's old family estate called Panther Creek visiting with my last surviving uncle and his son, another cousin.  We paid our respects at the old family graveyard.

And we went places.  Many places: the Mile High Bridge at Grandfather Mountain, Mount Airey where Andy Griffith grew up, and the zoo in Asheboro, NC.  Always together.  Some trips were confined to the Winston Salem area.  Others such as Grandfather Mountain, the zoo and Mount Airey were further afield.  But wherever I went I had my cousin with me.

My safe person in, what was to me a safe place.

The house my father grew up in

The family cemetery where I played as a child

The house on the Reynolda Estate where my grandparents, mother and an uncle lived in the 1930's.  It was built to 3/4 scale for the Reynolds children  and called the Dollhouse or Playhouse.

It worked.  Ten days later, I boarded my plane in Greensboro to head back up north.  Stuttering largely gone.  Mind functioning better.  I didn't need wheelchair assistance.  I was able to function on my own.  I managed the terminal change in Dulles airport by myself.  I have to confess that I kind of cheated - or God made it really easy for me.  On the train to the other terminal, I heard a man loudly talking into his cell phone about being in the process of changing planes and was heading to his plane to go to Toronto.  Toronto?  That was my next destination as well.  This man was not only loud, but he was very tall, a head above everyone else.  All I had to do was follow his head and voice to the right gate.

Thank God for loudmouths, eh?

Pilot Mountain, a familiar landmark which we children all eagerly looked for as we headed to our grandparents in Winston Salem.  We knew we were close to our destination when we saw the familiar knob.