Now I am at home with my family. Three times a week I have to go to a rehab clinic. This time at least they will teach me how to walk.
You start each session by bicycling in a stationary bike. Then you lift weights with your legs. You’ll learn how many different ways they can add weights to your legs and make you bend. When you go home they will give you bands to exercise with. It took me about three months before I was able to take my first steps. When you take your first steps they count how many steps you take so you can take more the next. I believe I was up to about 12 steps then they told me I had to stop.
I needed a hernia operation. I had needed it before the liver transplant. They could not do the operation with all the other things going on. But now that I was doing so much better they decided I could handle the operation. When you get a hernia operation there is no heavy lifting for three months. The only way I could stand up was the lift myself up with my arms. So for the next three months I was stuck in my wheelchair again.
Once those three months had passed we had to start all over again. This time they began again to get me walking longer distances. Kinda. What I mean by kinda is that on occasion I tripped. One time my son took me to see my kidney doctor. On the way out of the doctor’s office I told him to go get the car because I only had a few steps to the bench. That is where I was going to sit down. But instead of sitting down, I fell onto the bench and then onto the ground. When my son came with the car a minute later, he got to see me on the ground surrounded by people. When I was taken to the emergency room, they gave me an x-ray. The x-ray said that I broke a rib on the right side. There was another time my father-in-law took me shopping at Lowe’s. We were just there to get some things for the house. Unfortunately we had just left rehab and I had to go to the bathroom. I went to the handicap bathroom and locked the door behind me. Afterwards my father-in-law would never let me forget this. This is probably the maddest I ever made him. This was because when I tried to transfer myself from the wheelchair to the toilet seat I fell. I fell so hard I had to go to the emergency room. But first, he had to get the stall door open. There’s no room in their stalls the climb under. Once he got me out and took me to the emergency room they did a CT scan. They found out that I had a fracture of the right transversal process at L2 and L3 in my back. Or in other words I broke my back.