Eleanor's Story
When she saw her husband, Curtis, Eleanor Taber’s face lit up.
For 67 years, since the time President Eisenhower was planning the country’s response to a Soviet- satellite called Sputnik, Curtis and Eleanor have seldom spent a day apart. Now in their 80s, the couple worried that a short trip to Select Medical Rehabilitation Hospital of Denton might mean a prolonged separation.
But the day Curtis walked into her hospital room, he wasn’t just a visitor at Select Medical Rehabilitation Hospital: Curtis was part of the team.
Eleanor had fallen at their home a 15-minute drive away at Teresa’s House Assisted Living and Memory Care in Denton. When the pain in her pelvis became excruciating, she went to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital ― Flower Mound, where X-rays revealed a fractured pelvis. Surgery wouldn’t have helped, the doctors told her. They suggested she return to the rehabilitation hospital that had helped her once before when she had COVID. There, physical, occupational and speech therapists led by a physician might help her learn to stand and walk again. Since the fall, she could only take about three steps and couldn’t stand upright for more than 30 seconds.
The rehabilitation hospital came with its own set of worries. Since Eleanor had been an inpatient at Select at the height of the pandemic, most hospitals wouldn’t allow patients to have much physical contact with their families out of worry over spreading the virus. Eleanor had a great experience at Select Rehabilitation Hospital of Denton ― she loved the team and knew she was in good hands ― but she could only talk to loved ones on the phone or through glass windows.
That included Curtis. He and Eleanor had grown up together in Van Horn, a town of about 2,000 people living along Interstate 10 as it shoots through the yucca trees and creosote bushes of the Chihuahuan Desert in Texas’s far west. They were high school sweethearts who got hitched in the 1950s and began one of those love affairs everyone hopes lies just after the end of a movie. Sixty-seven years and counting. In sickness and in health.
And now sickness had come calling again. Eleanor and Curtis were both living with dementia, and that made therapy a challenge. At the rehabilitation hospital, Eleanor wasn’t always sure when and where she was, and following complex directions was difficult.
At first, Eleanor felt anxious without Curtis. And about a 15-minute drive up the road, Curtis was antsy without Eleanor. “They’re stuck together like glue,” said Kathy Peterson, their daughter. When her mom fell, Kathy drove four hours from Houston and stayed overnight in the room during her mother’s weeklong stay.
After Eleanor and Curtis graduated high school, Curtis enrolled at Texas A&M University. Eleanor followed, and a family came soon after. Following graduation, Curtis worked for a while in Dallas and later started his own landscaping business in Carrollton, Texas.
When it came time to retire, Eleanor and Curtis pined for the wide open spaces of their youth and moved to the country, and eventually found themselves spending evenings just sitting together and watching the deer that wandered into their yard.
Shortly after Eleanor admitted to the rehabilitation hospital, Kathy began driving Curtis there every day. And when he arrived, Eleanor smiled as if the bulk of a century hadn’t been enough time with Curtis. As if home wasn’t Carrollton, Dallas or even Van Horn. Home was Curtis.
Curtis calmed Eleanor and gave her strength. They held hands. They talked. Curtis joined her therapy sessions and encouraged her. So did other family members, like Kathy. Her sister, Karen Russell, brother Steve Taber and his wife, Wendy, lived nearby and also pitched in to help. The hospital calls efforts to involve family, the Care Partner Program ― who knows what a patient needs to get back to their day-to-day life better than their own family?
And Eleanor wasn’t the only student. Her old classmate learned as well. “It helped dad to see how she needed help and how to help her,” Kathy said.
The Care Partner Program helped particularly with the use of a car cane ― a device that could help Eleanor get in and out of a steep SUV the family sometimes uses. Everyone got a lesson from the physical therapist on how to help Eleanor move again safely. Another thing the physical therapist discovered was that one of her legs was slightly longer than the other, a result of her fall. To handle the discrepancy, the therapist used a shoe insert. It helped improve her gait. Eleanor exercised with a punching bag while standing to improve her balance. Therapists helped her to use a rolling walker and a 6-inch high step, providing multiple repetitions to help Eleanor remember how to use them. It’s training the family still uses to help Eleanor get around safely.
An occupational therapist had her perform dumbbell exercises to increase her upper body strength. She began using an ergometer, pedals she pushed with her arms to build strength. With her family at her side, Eleanor began to show progress. She and her family went to the hospital kitchen with the occupational therapist and the speech therapist, making Eleanor’s famous chocolate chip cookies. There, they learned Eleanor followed directions given strategies for remembering what step in the recipe she was on. While Eleanor worked on whisking, she impressed everyone by showing she could stand for five or more minutes at a time.
Though her dementia affected her memory, a speech language pathologist provided written aids and spaced retrieval techniques to help Eleanor with sequencing and remembering things more easily. Eleanor was able to recall when and where she was and how to follow a recipe with the aids and supports she was provided.
Eleanor has been through a lot in recent years, Kathy said. She’d had a few falls, but she always got back up and kept moving. That was Eleanor.
Then came COVID. Then came her big fall. Each mishap seemed to challenge her resilience, and the family was worried.
But by the time she was ready to go home with Curtis again, Eleanor seemed to have bounced back. She’s back to her old self, Kathy said.
“The rehab helped her to get out of her depression,” Kathy said. “It helped her to realize she still has a lot of fight in her and to keep trying and to not give up.”
And neither Eleanor nor Curtis is ready to give up on the love story that first bloomed all those lifetimes ago in a little desert town.