How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mistah Stroke?

Baylor Rehab people are great on setting goals, even when those goals are tiny and creep out us more abled types. My goal is to know when I'm going to crap. My goal is to roll my chair to the short bus. My goal is to clean my dick. And, don't get me wrong, I salute all goal-setting and a victorious climb to the summit from base camp.

This cheerful can-do thinking can leak into us bedraggled caretakers too. Me, my goal is to search out Mistah Stroke and beat him with a frying pan until he looks like a mashed peach. But I probably shouldn't add it to the optimistic scrawlings on the white board installed in our newly rearranged home. The eighteen pounds of stroke reading Baylor piled in my arms mentions that there will be a change in emotions.

I imagine my funny witty boy is in there somewhere and maybe he can dig out. Sometimes I can even see him flickering like a candle in my hub's eyes. In the meantime, as the literature says, a flat-voiced entity, prone to fury has taken over, equipped with lousy judgement and the self-centeredness of a toddler. "Why haven't you picked up my shirts from the cleaner's?" Mistah Stroke demands. Because you can't walk, or button it, or have a place to wear it, and I'm too fucking tired, I answer in my echoing head, but I say, "I had other shit to do" and Mistah Stroke glares at me. "Like what?" And I don't say that I get up at 7 AM and keep running until 12 PM, when I write, pay bills, and watch drops of sweat land on my calculator. "Just a buncha shit," I say, in what I hope is a kindly voice that my boy might recognize.

Mistah Stroke requires catheter changing, 3 + large special salt-free, sugar-free carefully balanced meals, blood sugar readings, blood pressure readings, sponge baths, haz-mat waste disposal, swabs of antibiotic on a pressure point, Gold Bond Powdering, chair lifts and transfers, pillow shiftings, and clothing changes.

I require a nights sleep.

I took a nap this evening and woke to screaming. COME IN HERE RIGHT NOW! GODDAMNIT I KNEW IT! THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK! I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE YOU WERE FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF AND WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO? AND THERE YOU WERE IN FRONT OF LAW&ORDER. YOU ALWAYS GO TO SLEEP IN FRONT OF LAW&ORDER. THIS IS A BIG FAIL. A BIG FAIL.

So I cried for a while and then got Mistah Stroke ready for bed. We ended the day like we began it, Mistah Stroke and me: in complete lunacy. He was up bright and early this AM. And when I dragged my weary ass in, he told me he was worried about all the money we owed Led Zepplin. "We do?" I asked, brightening some, wondering if I'd been living a more exciting life than in my current tar pit. "Yes," Mistah Stroke said, firmly, "and I'm worried." "I'll figure it out," I told him when I returned with his lumberjack's breakfast, which I plopped in front of him. I drank a Red Bull as he chewed moodily, then remarked grudgingly, "The food's better than in the hospital. Maybe it's better here." Maybe.

You have to take care of yourself, say the well-meaning voices. I'm given nice lotions and a candle. Pamper yourself, say the voices, as I throw the 18th wash in and scrub down two bathrooms with Clorox ala the infection-fighting pamphlet from Baylor. I've got other things on my mind besides fun pedicures, believe me.

I like to think about owing money to Led Zepplin, though. Rockers trump rehab every time.