A determined lady is a force to be reckoned with

After her stroke, my neighbor Donna landed in the hospital. Then she was moved to a rehab unit, then transferred to a nursing home, which was supposed to have been her final destination.

There had been a big meeting of her doctors, social workers and her family — the city mice who had flown in from points all over the country. They all agreed that Donna would never go home again. After all, she was now 87 years old and had serious health problems.

Her son and daughter-in-law showed up and drove away with her car.

“Don’t you let them put a ‘For Sale’ sign up in front of my house,” Donna said when I visited her in the nursing home. “I’m coming home.”

I remained silent.

“This place is costing me a fortune and doesn’t even have wastebaskets.”

“Wastebaskets? Really?”

Donna sat in a recliner chair in a large, clean room, fully equipped with a kitchen, bathroom, hospital bed, TV, and even a small patio out the sliding glass door. But apparently, no wastebaskets.

“They will provide one, but they charge extra. Or, you can bring one from home. So, I might as well just go home.”

“How much extra for a wastebasket?”

“I don’t know, but for $400 a day, you’d think you’d get a waste basket. And a washcloth and towel.”

“They don’t provide those either?”

“Nope.”

What the facility did provide was three square meals a day, two delivered to her room and one served in the communal dining room. Donna had to get there on her walker on her own.

“They only lay eyes on me twice a day, once when they bring my breakfast, and again when they bring my supper. I could die between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m. and no one would know.”

“But what about physical therapy and occupational therapy?”

“Very little. And they’re in and out in 10 minutes. The physical therapist gave me a list of things I had to be able to do before I can go home. Stand up, sit down unattended. Check. Walk to the bathroom. Check. Heck, I’m walking to the dining room. Wash your face. How am I supposed to do that without a washcloth? I’m working my way down the list with the rest. Check, check, check.”

I knew what her family had decided, so I didn’t want to encourage this homeward movement, but frankly, it did sound better than lying in bed dead for hours at $400/day sans wastebaskets.

“And I’m so bored here. What’s happening to the lawn at home?”

Uh, oh. Donna’s mind had turned to lawn mowing. She loved mowing the lawn and had a state-of-the-art John Deere riding mower sitting in her garage. Through the years, I’d noticed that whenever she was stressed or wanted space from her husband, Stu, she mowed the lawn. All three acres. In the heat of the day. 95 to 115 degrees. It didn’t matter the temperature. She kept on mowing. Various neighbors had offered to help, but she refused any aid.

“Oh, don’t worry about your lawn,” I told Donna. “The neighbor guys have it covered.”

Three different neighborhood men were rotating through on their riding mowers. The men ranged in age from 13 to 60. One mowed each week, sometimes twice. The summer had been rainy, hot, and steamy, the grass growing fast. There had been no particular order to the rotation. The men would drive by on their way to somewhere else, notice the grass had gotten a little high, and within a couple of hours, it was cut. Sometimes, one neighbor would show up and mow on Monday, and another on Wednesday. I knew who was on the other side of the fence by the distinct sound of their Walker mowers.

I had covered Donna’s outside chores all summer. Once the gates were secured, Donna’s lambs grew nicely in her pasture, and her geese were waddling in and out of her pond. A Mennonite neighbor had brought in a crew to clean the whole house. A third young neighbor scrubbed down Donna’s garage so well that you could have eaten off the floor. Then he kept up with her garden that was cascading with ripening tomatoes.

“I’m almost done with the list,” Donna called me on the phone to alert me of her progress. “Coming home soon.”

Her daughter appeared later that same day. “She’ll never be able to go home. They won’t discharge her with a catheter.”

The next week, I got the word. “Come and get me.”

Really? Oh, OK. I showed up in Donna’s nursing home room. She’d packed all her belongings in seven or eight large grocery bags. I went up to the nurses’ station to see if I could find a cart, but I was left to my own devices.

“Looks like I’ll make several trips,” I told Donna.

I carried all the bags out to my car, tucked in Donna’s small suitcase, and a couple of boxes of food that had been in the refrigerator. Finally, I helped Donna maneuver into the front seat, her catheter bag hanging from her walker. I figured that some arrangement had been made for maintaining this device. A visiting nurse, perhaps, was coming to the house. Surely, someone would be there that afternoon. Doors closed and locked, we headed out of the parking lot.

“Geez, the nurses weren’t too helpful about finding a cart.” I said.

“That’s because they’re mad I’m going home.”

“What? You didn’t have clearance for this move?”

“No.”

“Not from the doctors either?”

“No.”

“What about your family?”

“They are all against it.”

“What?”

“‘I hope you get along OK at home,” they said.

Oh, no, I thought. But get along OK at home she did. The first thing to go was the catheter.

“I was a nurse for 40 years,” Donna said. “I put in a million of these things. I certainly know how to take one out.”

Next, the physical and occupational therapists showed up at home and both forbade her from walking on the uneven grass.

“It just needs to be mowed,” Donna reassured them.

Then an Amish neighbor appeared in her black bonnet to start making meals. I’d defrosted some venison I’d found in Donna’s freezer, and the neighbor made enough small meals to last a month.

Next, Donna’s church sent a home health aide with two black crosses wired to the grill of her car. The aide took Donna to all her medical appointments. She got Donna up a high step and into the tiny shower in the mudroom. Once she was dry, Donna called the local plumber, telling him to rip out the bathtub and install a large walk-in shower in her regular bathroom.

Little by little, over the course of the next couple of months, Donna improved. The aide took Donna to Walmart for groceries. She took her to the bank and around town to buy gift certificates for all the neighbors who had helped her. Soon, Donna was at the rec center walking around the track.

“I only made it around once,” Donna said, determined to do more laps.

Still, tiredness plagued her. Some days she woke up in the morning, had breakfast, then fell back in bed asleep. Her blood pressure plummeted and I tried to take her back to the hospital, but she refused.

“Oh, my blood pressure goes up and down,” she said.

Finally, she had a long-awaited appointment with a cardiologist and was fitted with a heart monitor. A week later, she swallowed a pill to address a heart arrhythmia issue.

Then suddenly, her car reappeared in her drive.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“I’ll just drive to church and back,” she promised.

What she didn’t mention was dealing with the lawn. One late afternoon, I was cleaning up my garden, readying it for winter, when I heard the distinct sound of a mower drifting over the fence. And not a Walker mower. A John Deere mower. Donna’s John Deere mower.

“Hey, what’s going on over there?” I called.

But Donna didn’t hear me. She sat in the mower seat, earphones on her head, blocking out all other sound. Back and forth, she mowed the front yard, around the mailbox, around the bird feeder poles, and the flower beds. She mowed through the backyard, the racket shooing her geese toward the pond. Back and forth, and back and forth, Donna mowed, the sun shooting its descending rays down through the trees.