HUMOR

Just Another Day in the Perils of Carol or a Day in a Wheelchair and a Flood

What happens when your subconscious runs the show

So, I’m on the toilet facing backwards. I front load these days from the wheelchair and straddle the toilet. It’s my new circus trick. So far it’s been working just fine.

I start with both legs balanced on the sides of the raised toilet seat for people in wheelchairs, and hoist myself on. As I do that, my feet shift gently to straddle the toilet while dangling in the air. Until yesterday.

Week five of being in a wheelchair for two broken ankles is finally getting boring. I don’t ordinarily get bored. However, I’ve never tried being truly home-bound, even during lockdown. This is a whole other boat to row.

So what happens when people get bored? They get into mischief. I wish I could report I got into good mischief, which fits who I am and no one would be surprised.

For instance, most people who know me are surprised I haven’t taken my young neighbor up on the idea of lowering me down two flights of stairs from my apartment in a homemade sling. It’s exactly something I would ordinarily consider in an effort to get out and about.

However, I’m actually trying to be good, and even adult, about this being stuck in the apartment and healing thing. Adulting is not my favorite, so this is a big deal.

The subconscious on the other hand has no such restrictions. The subconscious is a stubborn little being who doesn’t like being bored. I can tell by the increasingly intense dreams I’m having.

The night before this unfortunate event, I dreamed of taking a shower. That might not sound intense to you, but I was so desperate for a shower in the dream that I did it outside in an alley under a broken pipe. With scary people around.

I took that as a sign and showered that morning. I can’t shower often in my predicament, because it’s only safe when someone is available in the event of worst case scenario, that I fall again.

Apparently expressing through dreams isn’t enough though for a bored subconscious. It has to create actual chaos.

I blame my subconscious for the incident yesterday. It’s either that, or the clumsiness of being in a cast on one leg and an orthopedic boot on the other, and the inability to put any weight on either that’s the culprit. Let’s go with the subconscious stirring up some excitement.

Yesterday, at some point that’s no longer clear to me, during the activity of being on the toilet, after front loading and before fully finishing the business at hand, my booted foot somehow thrashed and hit the pipe in the wall that connects to the toilet and supplies water. Lots and lots and lots of water.

Let me tell you, if you’ve never broken one of those pipes, the water pressure is unbelievable. If only my shower, that I finally was able to take yesterday, had a tenth of that water pressure. Actually, a thousandth of it might be enough. A tenth could remove skin.

The pipe snapped, the water gushed, rushed, roared out, and within minutes everything was soaked, including my boot and cast and the shorts that were hanging off my booted leg. The bathroom floor was rapidly filling with water.

In a panic, I tried turning off the handle connected to the toilet. That wasted precious seconds as the water was coming out of the wall, not the toilet. I called the apartment manager’s office, yelling to be heard over what sounded like Niagra Falls.

I then rapidly finished up, flushed, shook off my sodden shorts, hoisted back into the wheelchair, grabbed a towel to throw over my lap, and headed for the bathroom door.

Where I got stuck. It seems you need traction to move a wheelchair over a doorway, and water doesn’t allow for traction. Plus, the carpet I was attempting to roll onto was also rapidly becoming soaked from the roiling whitewater emanating from the broken pipe.

I called my young neighbor. The very one who wanted to take me downstairs in a sling. I yelled my dilemma into the phone, and he ran over to lift my chair over the doorway, so I could wheel to my bedroom to put on a more full coverage dress in place of the top and towel, just in time for the maintenance people to show up and wade through the disaster to shut off the water.

I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding in my home office, while the poor maintenance guys used a shop vac to vacuum the water from the bathroom, and from the carpet that was soaked almost halfway through the living area.

Today I’m awaiting the delivery of a new washer and dryer, the carpet is still wet and is pulled up and being dried with massive machines whose cords are in the way of the delivery guys, there are dirty footprints on the bathroom and kitchen floors which are for obvious reasons not mine, and the cats are traumatized.

What are the takeaways here?

Maybe I shouldn’t take any more showers. Could it be this was like washing your car and then it rains?

If you’re in a wheelchair, consider accident proofing your home. Now, I’m contemplating begging the apartments for hardwood floors instead of carpet, and to replace the pipe from the wall to the toilet in the other bathroom. It looks a little rusty and suspiciously fragile.

Don’t schedule major appliance deliveries the day after a flood. Or maybe do. It can’t get much funkier in here.

I’ve got at least two more weeks in this wheelchair, and I’d like to avoid any more disasters. If only my subconscious and feet will cooperate for two more weeks.

Hang in there you three. I’ll have you out and about in no time. Either in a sling or floating out on a massive rush of water.