Disoriented
Joseph is 44, but he's in a nursing home. I know his age because the first time we spent time together was on his birthday. We went out for a hot dog. Joseph has spina bifida, and walks with a limp and a cane. He used to work in kitchens before his feet got too bad to stand on all day. Now he lives at the YMCA, and he goes to a clinic on the North Side every Wednesday to have the sores on his feet cleaned.
I haven't seen Joseph for three weeks when he calls me from the nursing home. The doctors put a brace on his foot, and he has to stay off his foot and have the brace adjusted every day.
I take the bus to the nursing home. The stop is right in front of the big new Giant Eagle; I stop in to pick up lunch for us. I'm completely disoriented by the deli counter from New York c. 1900, the organic section where the aisles go at acute angles to the rest of the store, and the condiments aisle where on the third pass I finally pick up two bottles of hot sauce that are still in my fridge.
The nursing home is almost directly behind Giant Eagle. I get there by crossing a major intersection in the wrong direction, waiting for two red lights, and trading a panhandler a banana for directions.
I sign in at the front desk, and the nurse receptionist tells me a room number and points me to the elevator. This is not like the nursing home I worked in as a kid. This is the kind of nursing home that Medicaid puts you up in. It's crowded and old. The elevator is small and metal. It's by the train tracks.
Joseph is in a room with three others. He has a bed by the window and his own TV, but the curtains only stretch so far, and the door to the hall is open. The impression is not one of privacy.
I do recognize the dull red, textured plastic plate covers from my days in the kitchen. Joseph hasn't opened his. He is known, it turns out, for not eating his food. He's happy for roast beef sandwiches, and he carefully lays out napkins for us so we don't have to put our food on his side table.
Lunch is great. We catch up. He asks me about my job, my family. We talk about this and that. He won't complain about the food he won't eat. He is apparently unworried about the bill for the room that Medicaid won't cover fully. He is worried about his mildly estranged teenage daughters, now mothers. "They're making the same mistakes we did. Sex is the easy part." But he doesn't begrudge the room that is too dirty for us to be eating in. He laughs genuinely and changes the subject when I ask about his foot. But eventually he does show me his foot.
He can't pull a sock over his brace (in fact, he had to rip his only pair of pants the whole way up the outside seam to get them on), so the sores that he has always kept hidden before are there to see. The infection has been cleaned; now the flesh is crusty, scaly, and swollen taught.
The brace itself is like an erector set framing his foot, about eight or ten inches around, from the bottom of his calf to his toes, bending at the heel. Joseph calls it his "moon boot." There is a quarter-inch pin that goes the entire way through the base of his leg, bone and all, from one side of the brace to the other. There are four or five more smaller pins that go through the foot itself. Each day a doctor turns a series of dials on the brace that wrack the pins. In effect, Joseph's foot is being slowly broken and reformed. It might not work. His already stressed flesh puckers around the pins.
When we're done visiting, he wraps up the rest of the food for later, except for the hot sauce, which I put in my bag. He pulls himself into a wheel chair, his leg showing to the waist, and shows me out. We file into the metal elevator after waiting our turn and return to the main floor. I get turned around coming off the elevator and, waving good-bye, start out the back door, into the courtyard where Joseph is headed for a smoke. Amidst the nurses and wheelchairs, he points me in the right direction, and we part ways.
