Susan's Story
Three words stared up at Susan Aldrich from a bingo card.
Each square on the card contained the name of an object she could find in the room where she was sitting. Susan’s therapist had given her the task not only of recognizing each item – harder since the stroke – but also of making her tongue, teeth and voice box push out each syllable.
The three words Susan was staring at meant more to her and her husband, Robert, than most others in the English language.
“Pooh bear” and “Babe.” In a way, they were sacred. The names had been with the Aldriches through 44 years of marriage -- through four children, 18 grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.
The couple was in the midst of a long stay at Select Medical Rehabilitation Hospital at Lutheran Hospital, their second medical facility in as many months. Weeks earlier, Robert had awakened one morning to find Susan not moving. He dialed 911. Doctors at Parkview Huntington Hospital told him she had a non-traumatic intracerebral hemorrhage, a spontaneous brain bleed often caused by high blood pressure.
Since then, Robert’s 69-year-old wife needed help to sit, stand, think and speak. She received it from the rehabilitation hospital’s physician-led team of physical, occupational, speech and respiratory therapists, along with nurses, a dietitian and a pharmacist. And from Robert, who in two months had scarcely been away from her side.
The bingo card was her speech language pathologist’s idea. In the life to which she ached to return, Susan was an avid bingo player, so the therapist listed words she could pick out and pronounce on the card and marked them off till she picked out a row or four corners.
Susan pursed her lips over the P and B sounds in Pooh Bear and Babe. Muscles in her throat contracted awkwardly. That was part of the point. The therapist picked Pooh Bear and Babe after performing a swallow study that showed those sounds in particular – P and B – would help her gain back some of the strength she’d lost that was hampering her ability to swallow.
Saying Pooh Bear and Babe were steps toward eating solid food again.
For weeks after her stroke, Susan needed a pair of health care workers to both sit up in and lie back in bed. Two people had to help her slide from her bed to a wheelchair. She could neither walk nor talk and lacked the stamina to tolerate an entire therapy session. Doctors hooked her to oxygen tanks to help her breathe through the tracheostomy they’d opened to save her life.
Her doctor at Parkview Regional Medical Center suggested Susan might benefit from a rehabilitation facility. Twenty years earlier, she’d had her gallbladder removed at Lutheran Hospital. That had gone well, so they decided to take a chance on Select Medical Rehabilitation Hospital at Lutheran Hospital.
Robert was initially nervous about rehab -- was it necessary? He’d been shaken and was in unfamiliar territory. Susan had always been the caregiver in the family. She’d quit her job to take care of her sister, who had lost a husband and was struggling through shoulder and hip replacement. Fifteen years ago, when Robert was fighting uterine cancer, Susan had stepped in to help without a complaint.
She’d baked for him, joined him on fishing trips and helped take care of their growing herd of grandchildren. She filled the house with Babe knickknacks – the pink talking pig from the 1990s movie “Babe.” Also, Susan went for Winnie the Pooh. Figurines, pictures and stickers.
“One thing the good Lord pointed out to me,” Robert said. “Sometimes we don’t think about how we take advantage of our wives.” She’d always been there for him. Robert vowed to be a better man for her.
He was struck by the members of her care team at the rehab. Before Susan arrived, doctors had been helping her learn to stand. Her physical therapist quickly outfitted her with a wheeled device that support her weight while she worked on making her legs move as if she was walking.
The therapist taught her to use it a pole to pull herself to a stand, so she could move from one seat to another. The strategy saved her from using the walker for everything, and to feel more confident in her ability to move around freely.
Similarly, occupational therapists helped her hold herself with grab bars around the toilet, eliminating her need for help from other people.
Susan’s right side had weakened more than her left. To help strengthen her right arm, her occupational therapist gave her plastic suction cup toys. She affixed them to surfaces using them to pullherself along while building strength in her right arm.
Robert stayed with her every day and watched the Susan he loved start to reemerge. She began saying small sentences. Robert helped her celebrate every little step, marveling when she’d nod or react to something new or learned to pull up her socks by herself. He hugged her and reminded her how strong she was.
He participated in the hospital’s Care Partner Program, where he learned how he could take care of her with her limited mobility at home. The program made him feel more confident that once she returned, he could handle it.
Susan began to stack up successes. Before long, she could walk 150 feet with her walker and assistance from another person. Strategies the team helped tailor to her abilities helped her learn to dress herself, eat and move again.
"Many of her most memorable milestones came with words attached. On one of the best days, she stood, hugged him on her own and told him she loved him.
On another day, she managed to say Pooh Bear and Babe.
During nearly all of their 44 years of marriage, in good times and bad, Robert called Susan his Babe.
And to Susan, Robert had always been Pooh Bear.
After 23 days at Select Medical Rehabilitation Hospital at Lutheran Hospital, the couple returned home. She continued to receive therapy from an outpatient facility and improve.
And as for getting used to life at home among the knickknacks, Pooh Bear has it covered this time.