Paul came home on June 29th from the rehab facility.
He came home in a wheelchair.
Several of his co-workers came over that week and helped me prepare the house for his homecoming.
We put ramps into the house from the front door, the garage, and the screened in porch. Prior to his stroke he enjoyed sitting on the porch listening to music in the evenings and I wanted him to still be able to do that if he felt up to it.
We also installed a comfort-height toilet and added a bidet attachment to the toilet. We did this in the hall bathroom. This bathroom was smaller than the master bathroom, but because of shape, would be easier to do transfers from the wheelchair to the toilet.
We got a transfer bench for the tub in the hall bathroom. In order for that to work correctly, we removed the glass doors on the tub, removed the metal frame for the doors, caulked the screw holes in the tub with silicone and installed a shower curtain.
I was feeling pretty good about the prep work – and excited to bring him home!
The day he came home, we discovered a couple of other things we needed to do.
Take the door off the hall bathroom. The wheelchair would not fit through the doorway with the door on. We took the door off and put up a shower curtain with a tension rod across the doorway so that he would have some privacy.
We needed to install a grab bar on the wall across from the toilet. the wall was close enough that he could reach up to grab the bar with his left hand and pull himself up from the toilet. It’s also useful when he is standing up from the bathtub transfer chair.
One of our sons came over and helped get those things set up.
Make sure you limit rugs in your house. We removed rugs completely from the bathroom and only have a large thin area rug in the living room over part of the hardwood floors. Rugs are harder to roll over in the wheelchair and once your IS progresses to a walker, you want to minimize the opportunity for slips and falls.
Now let me tell you one of the things that really saved us some headaches. That would be our bed. About a year before the stroke, we purchased a sleep number bed with an adjustable base. And we got the base with separate controls for each of us. What that means is that essentially we had 2 separate beds that were pushed together. It seemed a little weird at the time and we weren’t sure we would like it.
The problem is that I suffer from acid reflux and I sometimes need to sleep with the head of my bed elevated. But my spouse would not want to sleep in that position so it made sense that purchase this bed. It worked out fine for us. We had separate fitted sheets, but a king size top sheet and king size comforter, so we still felt like we were “together”.
Fast forward a year and if we did not have that bed we would have had to get a hospital bed for him because he was not able to sleep flat. He is still sleeping only on his back with the head and feet raised on the bed. And with being able to adjust the firmness, I can have a softer bed and he can have the firmness he needs. This bed is perfect for our post-stroke situation!
Sleep number beds can be pricey, but you can get 2 twin XL mattresses and this adjustable base from Amazon for a fraction of the cost if you need something quick and more affordable.
You can go here if you want to read about how we made a walker work with right-side paralysis.
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