Crescendo!

One day I came back from my physical therapy session to find a joyous party going on in our room. There were five or six support staff members enjoying the usual leftovers from patients’ trays, and the Reader was the delirious hostess. “We found it,” she told me. “It was in your drawer.” And behind her I saw the blue blanket, ostentatiously arranged at the foot of her bed.

That means, of course, that someone had gone through my drawer and found it buried beneath the white towel and whatever else there may have been there. This was done when I was out of the room and without my permission. Between this incident and the previous encounter with the staff members examining my adding machine with the thought that I might have stolen it also, I had had enough.

So I wheeled myself down to the nurses’ desk, but no one was there, so I waited, with the wheels of my chair pointing obliquely toward the desk.

All of a sudden my wheelchair was hit so hard at the side that it nearly fell over! I couldn’t imagine what had done it, and I hadn’t heard anyone coming. When I turned around, I saw a woman I had never seen before. She remained where she was in her wheelchair, and looked at me with hatred on her face. Not only that – when I looked beyond her, there stood Smiley in the hall, watching us, and grinning the biggest grin I had ever seen.

Across the lobby from the nurses’ desk was a large alcove about 10 feet wide and 5 feet deep. Half of the alcove was taken up by a very large plant in a very large bowl. This strange woman had not moved, so I quickly wheeled my wheelchair over and backed into the other half of the alcove and closed my eyes in relief. But she hadn’t finished; I felt something bump my toes, and there she was again, toe to toe with me, looking even more malevolent than she had before. And through all of this, not a word passed between us.

Just then, a nurse came back to the station, and I demanded that I be moved to another room immediately. I did not even stay to collect my clothes and possessions, leaving it to an assistant to bring to me. (Incidentally, one of my nightgowns was lost in the process.)

And as I left the room for the last time, the very religious Reader who had learned love from Christ waved her arms from side to side above her head and exclaimed, “God loves me! Thank you Jesus, thank you!”

End of Chapter 4