The other day they moved the big screen TV from the lobby into the dining room. This is due to the construction that has been taking place here at Lyndhurst apparently for the last five years. There are blueprints on the wall illustrating the changes to take place. Now, I’m no professional blueprint reader but it appears that they’re not only putting in ceramic tiles here but in fact building the Death Star.
Anyway, back to the TV… so the dining room has always been a big part of my rehab experience. I didn’t actually have to go in there until my fifth or sixth month of rehab and it was a huge challenge on my part. You see, due to my level of injury I require someone to both prepare my food and feed it to me. I’m getting used having my family do this but when it comes to having this done by a complete stranger, it can be frightening and awful… but that’s a topic for an entirely different blog.
So that TV thing… oh yeah, the other frightening thing about the dining hall is that you well, have to interact with… fellow patients. We sit at tables of four, all facing one another, poised for conversation. However, the thing is that the only thing we all have in common is that we’re all suffering from some sort of spinal cord injury. So the first question that people would ask a new patient is most likely, “how did you get injured?” Once that’s answered and we know why one another’s here, the conversation usually stops and silence follows.
So about that TV hey? One might think that the addition of this distraction would be appreciated during these lunches of silence. However, we seem to be ignoring the loud blaring television and holding on to our cathartic mealtime routine. There’s a sort of comfort in our awkward silence, to replace this silence with talk of injury, sickness and sadness would be as awful and repetitive as the meals that the dining room provides… oh delicious rehab food—orange pizza, leathery roast beef and salmon loin (now where exactly is the loin of the salmon located anyway?).