Quotes About Recovery

Indeed, in the medical model, the person with disability is placed under an obligation to want to get well, his or her multiple social roles of parent, worker, spouse, and so on being suspended temporarily in exchange for a sign of strenuous effort toward improvement.

Each year, about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, 40 percent end up in a nursing home, and 20 percent are never able to walk again.

two months before he left the hospital. Weak and debilitated, he lost his limousine business and his home

her arm. Her face sagged. Her speech slurred. Although

People who we had believed weren't able to speak started speaking," Thomas said. "People who had been completely withdrawn and nonambulatory started coming to the nurses' station and saying, 'I'll take the dog for a walk.

but the redness became virtually unnoticeable.

The hospitals lobbied the government for help, and in 1954 lawmakers provided funding to enable them to build separate custodial units for patients needing an extended period of "recovery." That was the beginning of the modern nursing home. They were never created to help people facing dependency in old age. They were created to clear out hospital beds—which is why they were called "nursing" homes.

waiting for the sick feeling to pass

What's more, Eleanor's fever had gone away;

Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off—or even alive.

he has the potential for a full return to practice.

that. He had no regrets about the operation. It had given him his life back, he said.

called him at home to hear how he had weathered the aftermath.

He looked like the victim of a forceps delivery.

When Ben came back to me, he said, Why are you laying with your face in the sand? I made sure all the laughter was out of me before I rolled over. I think it helps sunburn. I said.

Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all. But holes are interesting things.

Everybody in recovery smokes. If you don't like smoking, don't even bother trying to get sober. Just stay drunk.

Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.

No matter your spiritual beliefs, if you hold any, the answer is the same: sometimes, why is not knowable. If you open the refrigerator door and a tub of Kozy Shack tapioca pudding tumbles out and splats open onto the floor, you clean it. You don't stand there and question why it happened, how it was possible. Why doesn't matter now.

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn't it beautiful? Yes, it's beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do know myself. I cannot be sure I won't attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.

How the fuck did I get here? I thought. If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn't even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.

The horrible thing about being sober is you lose your excuse for being so fucked up.

Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.