Last Dance, Last Chance

distance, and he waved to me, and said, ‘Here!’ and tossed me his plastic water bottle. He must have thought that I said ‘I need some booze’ because as I took a sip from the water bottle, I realized I was drinking straight whiskey! He always had a plastic bottle with him on game day.”
    Both Rose and Shelly had happy marriages, but Shelly had survived a rough first marriage and she felt a lot of empathy for Debbie.
    Rose and Shelly bolstered her spirits. They told her that her house was fine and they were looking after it. Shelly even packed up her hairdressing salon and took it to Debbie’s hospital room.
    “They weren’t taking care of her the way she always did,” Shelly said. “The nurses were wonderful to her, but they didn’t have time to fix her up. Debbie was always very into her hair, and having her nails done nicely, and of course now she couldn’t use her hands.”
    “She even came to the hospital and dyed my hair for me,” Debbie remembered. “She did my nails and my makeup.”
    These attentions may not have been life saving, but they gave Debbie a boost when she had begun to feel like a useless lump lying in bed day after day with little hope. The sight of Shelly and Rose cheered her.
    If they believed she was going to make it, she could believe that, too.
     
    It wasn’t until the last few weeks in October that her nurses, Teena Wise and Jackie Keller, could get Debbie into a wheelchair to maneuver her into the shower.
    “I couldn’t move or stand, so they’d have to grab me under the arms to get me on my feet,” she recalled, “and the pain was so excruciating that I’d start screaming, ‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ It just hurt everywhere, and it hurt to be touched. But somehow we’d make it to the shower down the hall, and then they’d have to drape me with towels so I’d be decent enough when they wheeled me past my guard.”
    One night on the 11-to-7 shift, the nurses on duty had given Debbie all the medication that they could, and nothing seemed to touch her pain. “They came in, and they started crying. They were telling me, ‘Debbie, we don’t know what to do. We don’t have anything else to give you.’ I knew I had to let it ride.”
    Debbie remembered when one of her physical therapists suggested that she use other ways to function. They could attach instruments to her wheelchair to help her feed herself, and a sliding board to help her from the chair to the bed. She didn’t want to resort to that—it would be like admitting she would always be paralyzed.
    “With the help of my wonderful physical and occupational therapists, my nurses and doctors, I overcame many obstacles,” Debbie said. “Finally, I was able to walk with braces on my legs and a walker—just a few steps at a time. I was almost able to pick something up and put it in my mouth to eat. I was able to turn over in bed. You don’t know how important those things are until you can’t do them. With every little step, the staff was right there to cheer me on.”
    After two and a half months in the hospital, the time came for Debbie to leave. By the third week of October 1999, she had progressed as far as she could in the hospital rehabilitation center. She wanted desperately to go home to her own house. She was running out of health insurance. She had two choices: to go to a senior rehabilitation center (basically a nursing home) or go home with 24-hour care. She couldn’t begin to afford full-time nurses, and she could not possibly live alone. She would need help in the most ordinary of tasks that other people take for granted, along with regular shots and injections, and her mother didn’t think she could do that all by herself.
    There was no question about Ralph and Lauren coming home. To add to Debbie’s misery, the Children’s Protective Services Agency of the Erie County Department of Social Services was moving ahead with their efforts to take away her custodial rights to Ralph and Lauren.
    Debbie realized to her horror that perhaps she had inadvertently helped to bring their investigation into her capability as a parent down on herself. She had called her pediatrician and asked to have Ralph and Lauren tested for arsenic poisoning. Now, both she and Anthony were the objects of scrutiny. Her children were under a court order to stay in their uncle’s home. Despite all the physical pain, the worst pain Debbie endured was emotional. She was being kept away from her