!D for disability --- agk's phlog 9 August 2021 @ 0301 --- written on Pinebook Pro in the garage sore after a long motorcycle ride --- > In case studies, I manufacture a composite patient > and invent a name. They cannot be identified. I used to work on a stroke unit. Right or left side matters on stroke. It's easy to dislocate someone's arm on the affected side during transfer if the muscles are slack. Most patients are aspiration risks. Listen for diminished lung sounds and a-fib. Look for ankle edema. Five years before I met her, Artemis did a huge bong rip while listening to Five Finger Death Punch. She stood to let down the blinds. Her hand wouldn't work. Her same-side leg gave out. She lay on the trailer carpet and yelled help for an hour. An ambulance came. That was her stroke. Since the stroke, her mood slid all over the place: deliriously joyous and loving, heartrendingly beautiful, pitiful with despair. Years before, she left her backwoods county to be a Vegas phone ho and stripper. She grinded on Snoop Dogg, partied with light-skinned black men and rocked out to metal music. Now in her fifties, she thinks she might be turning gay. Discharge neared. We couldn't get an ambulance to take her to the long-term care facility. All we could fix was a three-hour cab ride---for a hemiplegic who can't sit up, a diabetic who might have a crisis on the road, a woman who can't control her bladder or bowels, who wants to love and be loved, who feels pathetic and useless. "Quit," I commanded when she cried and pitied everyone who wipes her ass and moves her body. "Tell me the nicest thing you done for somebody." She thought and said: "Everybody treated my friend Joan awful because of how fat she was. A man wouldn't let her ride a ride at the fair. I came at him like a pitt-bull til he let her on." "That set me thinking. I talked to a sweet boy I knew. He worked at McDonalds and was mildly retarded. That isn't the right word. I told him to ask her on a date. He did. They fell in love. He saved up and bought her a diamond ring. They married eighteen years ago." "Still married," she said when I asked. "Completely in love." "Since the stroke you can't move half your body," I said. "You can't control your bowels. You used to be so dang stubborn and independent because of what those guys did to you when you were a little girl. Why depend on people when they do stuff like that?" "The stroke forced you to depend on people, trust them to take care of you and not hurt you. You got bedsores when caregivers neglected you. Everybody needs people. It gets harder to pretend you don't once you're disabled." "You're going to long-term care. You'll lose the apartment and your dog. You'll have your good heart. People either can't stand you or completely love you. When you get to long-term care, don't dare lay in bed and feel sorry for yourself. People need you there. Love them with that amazing heart you got. When they die, grieve quick and love again." "Can I hug you?" she asked. I leaned down and hugged her, washed my hands, and walked down the hall to Phoebe's room. I made Phoebe chuckle, wiped feces out of her vagina, spread her labia, swabbed it with antiseptic, inserted the catheter, and drained her urine. Her scalp drooped where the piece of her skull had been removed. Her body was covered with stick-and-poke tattoos. "Feel better?" I asked. Phoebe grinned.