and the drafty wind that came through them made us feel as if we were back in the cold air of the hospital. There were also cracks in the ceilings and in the walls. Our house was settling down on its foundation after all those years that we had lived inside it. Our house had started leaking tooâthrough the roof and the ceiling, but also through the basement walls where there were cracks in the foundation. There were water marks on the ceilings and the walls and our house never dried out. We had roofers and builders and a handyman come out to look at our house, but none of them thought that it should be fixed. They all said that our house was too old and that too much of it needed to be replaced. They didnât say that we shouldnât keep living in it, but they were afraid that part of the roof or the ceiling might fall down on us. They were afraid that our house might flood in a heavy rain and that the foundation might be washed away. But we couldnât see any sky or anything else except for darkness through any of the cracks in the ceiling and we didnât worry too much about too much rain. We wanted to float away from all of this anyway.
What the Doctor Said that She Needed My wife moved less and got worse, but she didnât want to go back to the hospital. I got her to go to a doctor, but she couldnât walk enough with her walker to get out to our car and I couldnât lift her up to carry her that far either. She didnât want me to call an ambulance again, so I tried to think of ways to move her. I thought of things that would roll. I had a wheelbarrow out in the garden and a dolly out in the garage, but she wouldnât have let me help her get in or on either one of those. So I rolled an old desk chair out of our guest bedroom and into the living room. I helped her move from the seat of the living room chair to the seat of the desk chair without her needing to stand up. I raised the seat of the desk chair up so that her feet didnât touch the floor or catch in its wheels. I turned the desk chair on its swivel, held onto the armrests, and pushed her across the living room floor, through the kitchen, and out the back door. I rolled her down the back walk and around to the passenger side of our car. I helped her slide out of the desk chair and into the seat of the car. I buckled her in, closed her car door, and rolled the desk chair away from our car so that I wouldnât hit it when I backed our car out of the driveway. The people in the doctorâs office brought a wheelchair out to our car so that my wife could get across the parking lot and into the doctorâs office. I signed my wife in and we waited in the waiting room. There were other people there who were dying too and we had to wait for them to go first. We waited for them to call my wifeâs name and then we waited in the examination room. The nurse helped my wife take all her clothes off. I folded them up and held them in my lap. The nurse helped my wife put a hospital gown on that was cut open down the back and that had little ties on it to hold it together. The nurse helped my wife get up and lie down on top of the table with the paper stretched over it. It crinkled and ripped when she moved. We talked to the nurse and answered her questions and then we waited for the nurse to come back into the examination room with the doctor. The doctor told us that she just needed to sleep more. But we told him that we had become afraid of our bedroom and our bed and afraid of sleep. But the doctor told us that she needed to keep taking her pills to keep from having any more seizures and that she needed to take some other pills for sleep. The doctor told us that she needed to go back to the hospital, but he let us go back to our house. We drove from the doctorâs office to the drug store to get her prescriptions filled and get her some other things that we thought might help her. We bought her pills to reduce