My husband is going to the eye specialist on Monday to have a consultation on his cataracts. There, I assume they will show him a little film (if he can see it) about the latest in cataract surgery, which will presumably feature lasers and maybe robots or some other high-tech med tools. Doppler radar, maybe, or AI scalpels.

Over the past year, my experience with med-tech has been decidedly low-tech, other than my bionic knee and my Frankenstein ankle. Everything else I’ve had to deal with has been a bit more, shall we say, basic?

The Transfer Board

This is exactly what it says—a board you use to transfer from one surface to another, like from a wheelchair to a bed or from a bed to a chair. By board, they mean heavy-duty plastic, like a huge cutting board. I learned about this amazing invention during a stay in a post-acute rehab facility that offered five-times-a-week physical and occupational therapy, necessitated by the bionic knee and Frankenstein ankle.

You sit on the board and slide, or rather lift your butt somewhat while leaning forward and scootching. (I’ve seen wooden ones in catalogs, polyurethaned to avoid the heartbreak of splinters. Even ones with butt-shaped seats that go down a track from end to end, so you don’t have to scootch. Too bougie for me, though. I’ve stuck to the plastic variety, sometimes literally. But I digress.)

Transfer boards are reversible and even upside-down-able. They’re easy to clean, should you be wearing a hospital gown and shart as you scootch. And now that’s a thing you know.

The Knee Sling

A knee sling is like an arm sling, only even more annoying and cumbersome. It’s a piece of cloth, sometimes with a metal frame, that is attached to a walker. It’s what you use to practice walking on one foot when you’re not allowed to put weight on the other one.

The procedure goes thus:

1. From a sitting position, fling yourself to standing on one leg within the confines of the walker. (In my case, it was not just a fling, but a massive push-off and a lurch. I was having enough trouble standing up already, but doing it one-legged was well-nigh impossible. (Un)fortunately, I got lots of practice. But I digress again.)
2. Bend the other leg (the one that can’t bear weight) into a 90-degree angle as you stand, without kicking the chair you were sitting on.
3. Try to guide the bent leg into the sling without letting go of the walker, which will be essential at this point. Good luck.
4. Ambulate (hop), using your one “good” leg and the walker for balance. (I found a decided tendency for the steering (me) to pull to the left, as my right leg was not involved in pushing off. But I digress some more.)
5. Continue doing this until the “bad” leg can once again bear weight. I think this is meant to teach patience, an OT skill, at the same time.

The Pill Caddy

Not directly tied to the rehab stays. In the rehab, the nurses brought my meds and injections twice daily, plus one extra pill visit three hours before wake-up time so I could digest it before breakfast.

Once I was home, though, I had to leave town for three days. I threw my bag-o’-drugs (literally a Meijer bag full of pill bottles) in our duffel bag and off we went. The drive back from Florida to Ohio meant we had to stay in a hotel (with an ADA-accessible room) halfway home.

When we got home, however, the bag-o’-drugs was nowhere to be found—not in the duffel, not in the car. I called the hotel management, who, after several days, admitted that the cleaning staff said it simply wasn’t there.

The people who had to refill all those scripts said I should fill out a police report or they couldn’t do it, as there were controlled substances involved. (No opioids, though.) I can just picture calling the police about it.

(Hello, Georgia police? I probably left my bag-o’-drugs in hotel room 109. No, I can’t come in to fill out a report. I’m 400 miles away. You’ll send me a report form, and I should fill it out and return it? Then you’ll process it and investigate the hotel? And get back to me sometime after that? And leave me unmedicated the whole time? Just no. But I digress still more.)

I finally got the scripts refilled after a doctor visit and three days of phone calls (none of them to the police). I owned my idiocy and went shopping online for a pill caddy.

I never knew there were so many kinds available—one set of pills per day, four sets of pills per day, one-week, two-week, monthly, easy-open buttons, vertical dispensers, and more. I settled on a no-frills model without the turbo-charged carburetor. One-week, twice-a-day.

I was all set to click “order” when I realized something. The caddy I had chosen was embossed with the days of the week, but they were backward. The names of the days were not mirror writing, of course, but the days of the week went from left to right: “Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday,” so you’d end up taking your pills from the right to the left, like Hebrew writing. I searched again and found multiple products labeled that way.

I ordered one with orderly days. It should arrive today. Filling it each week will be tedious, but not nearly so tedious as calling the Georgia police and getting transferred from department to department until I reach the department of clueless packers.