1 WEEK LATERIt’s back to Valley Nursing Home today for me, and I’m going out of the hospital in a wheelchair as opposed to the gurney they brought me in with. I’m also rid of the damned feeding tube. It’s nice to be able to eat again, to taste food—especially sweets, although it took me awhile to master the art of swallowing them. What I’m most grateful for is that I can talk now, although I have a bit of a stutter and sometimes I have a difficult time finding a word. It’s really frustrating when that happens because I can see the word in my mind, but when I go to say it, my tongue gets all twisted up. The speech language pathologist says the stutter may or may not go away, but that there are ways to minimize it.
A nurse wheels me down the busy corridor, and as we go, many of the hospital
