Well, coming home was, was difficult at first because all of the, all the doors to get into the house have got small steps, so the occupational therapist came at first to like assess the house to see if I could just be physically able to get in. So she gave my wife these ramps that we could use to get in through one of the doors and worked out which door would be the easiest to get in through. And I had to do like a safety test to get from my wheelchair into a car and just check my transfers. So once that was all sorted out, then it was safe for me to come home and I could get in. I was allowed to come home for a Sunday afternoon I think, I think we picked. My wife picked me up from hospital and brought me home. So I said I would come and have Sunday lunch and see the family, you know, just have some time out of hospital. So I did that and I think I did that 2 or 3 times before my discharge but the thing I used to do as well was when my wife would visit me in the evenings after she finished work, sometimes I would just say to her, “Please just take me out of the hospital, I don't care where we go, just out” and we'd just go in the car and just go for a drive and go to the park and just have some fresh air or whatever. So I used to just go out for short periods, just for half an hour or an hour in the evenings.
And when I was in hospital, well, it was at the time of the European championships football, so I can remember one of the matches that was on, some friends had come up and said they were arranging to go out and watch the game in the pub and they said, “Do you want to come?” and I said, “Well, yeah, OK”, so I asked the staff on the ward, the doctor and he said, “Yeah, that's fine, if you want to go, go, just don't come back too late and not too drunk”, so I said, “OK then” so they came and got me in my chair and had to push me. It's a fair old way from the hospital to the pub we went to, but we went there and watched the football.
One of the times as well when, the disability sort of really caught up on me and it was kind of when I appreciated how much, what effect it was going to have on my normal things in life because I wanted to go on the slot machine in the, when I was in the pub and I managed to put my good leg and with one hand, just pushed my chair a little bit towards the machine and got there, then couldn't reach to put my money in, so I had to stop somebody walking past and say, “Can you just put my money in for me?” And it was just one of those things where I thought, “I'm going to have so many problems, just small things”, things that perhaps you just take for granted that you can do that are going to become major events for me for the rest of my life. So that was a bit of a shock in a way. |
