Handicapped Items

We now possessed four handicapped items: the shower bench, the walker, the wheelchair and a grab bar that Dad installed next to the toilet. One of Mom’s friends lent us the wheelchair. On the rare occasion that I left the house, they wheeled me. Jamie refused to go into the bathroom because he didn’t want to see the bar and the shower bench. He didn’t want to see the proof that his sister was a manatee.

Happy

You might think that someone with these symptoms would be depressed, despondent and miserable, but I wasn’t. I felt like I was on a kind of vacation. I was enjoying spending time with the family, and it was a change from my normal life.
I was abnormally cheerful considering the circumstances. I was intensely odd because I found my situation hilarious. I couldn’t help but laugh at the things my body was doing. Falling off the toilet, my new voice, I was having fun. It must have been peculiar for the friends and relatives who came to visit during the manatee phase. They would find me off balance and barely able to walk, wrecking anything I touched and hard to understand. I was so messed up, but I didn’t care. I was happy. Perhaps the cheerfulness was due to the changes secretly going on inside my skull.
For an unknown reason, throughout this illness, I was almost always optimistic about my recovery. I just knew it wasn’t there to stay. Somehow, I had the feeling that this was a phase of my life that I had to pass through, and I often found the way my body acted amusing. I was constantly laughing at myself. My family was less sure about my recovery, but I think my attitude was helpful to them. But don't get me wrong, I had plenty of times of doubt and tears. I just had an overall attitude of optimism.
I’m not sure if the optimism came from what the doctors said (that the inflammatory process would resolve itself), a side effect of the disease, or from within myself and the inability to accept the possibility that this might not go away. I’m sure the Lexapro, an anti-depressant that I’d been taking for about two years, helped too. Whatever the reason, I felt happy.