2 June 2025
Joyce was again reluctant to get out of bed but she sat up and got dressed. I walked her around the corner toward her chair by the far door to the gym.
But as we got closer, Daisy the RNA, grabbed the chair. "Hey!" Joyce shouted. "That's my chair!"
Daisy knew that, of course. The chair in that place alerts her that Joyce is getting dressed and on her way. And Mondays she walks Joyce. So she was just repositioning the chair behind Joyce to continue the walk.
But Joyce insisted on sitting down in the chair, so we obliged.
Once she sat down, we encouraged her to get up again and go for a walk. She wanted to know how far. "Let's see how far you can go," I suggested vaguely.
She got up with Daisy and walked to the end of the short hall, made the turn and continued. I followed with the wheelchair.
"Let's weigh you without the chair," I suggested so she'd keep walking. And, with a little cheerleading, she walked down the hall, crossed to the other side (where there has been a Covid outbreak, I learned from the social working today when she explained why she wasn't coming in) and continued down the long hall and around another corner to the scale.
She climbed on the scale and got a reading of 113.
She sat down in the wheelchair briefly while we negotiated more walking, now with Wendy joining us. "To your room," Daisy suggested.
Joyce wasn't quite sure how far that was, but she got up and started walking with one of them on each side and made it all the back to her room. They encouraged her to keep going around the corner to where she had started. And she did.
So for the first time she made it the whole way around the facility, a total of 500* feet.
Later, when she was eating lunch, I let Kevin the Physical Therapist know and he congratulated her, asking how she felt. "It was OK," she said. She just wanted to make sure the chair was behind her, she said. "That's great!" he said. "Yep," I added, "now she can make it to the bus stop."