Found: Someone With Enough Guts to See Me Naked

Once a week at the Huntington Hospital rehabilitation center a committee of doctors, nurses and therapists meets to review patients’ progress and decide their fate.

The committee ruled that I was fit to be dismissed from the hospital on a certain Saturday but that I was not “independent.” That meant that I would need constant help to get around and do what I had to do.

For eight weeks my wife had been taking care of me. But all her vacation time was used up and she had to get back to work. She is administrative director of the Southern California Counseling Center. Not only do they need her there, but she loves her work and missed it.

I insisted that she go back to work. Taking care of me was not easy. She had begun forgetting things or getting things wrong. She is usually so efficient and reliable that I realized she needed some relief. She even had to go to the bathroom with me to make sure I didn’t lose my balance and take a tumble in my walker. A broken hip would have been the last straw.

I am supposed to call her before I get up to go anywhere. One of the hardest things to recover after a stroke, I found out, is one’s sense of balance. I tend to fall to the right.

My daughter-in-law Jackie had bought me a silver bell to use in calling my wife, but our house is large and she did not always hear it. So my other daughter-in-law, Gail, brought me a coach’s whistle, which does the job, but whose shrill summons must be nerve-racking to the poor wretch for whom it is intended.

All these problems concerned us when we realized we would have to hire someone to take my wife’s place. Who could possibly fill that bill? It would have to be someone who was physically strong, temperamentally tough and monumentally patient. I am not the easiest person to take care of, especially now that I am physically limited.

We discussed it. I said one thing was certain. It would have to be a woman. She pointed out that the job would require physical strength, if just for getting my wheelchair in and out of the car. I pointed out that the suggestion that a woman wasn’t strong enough was sexist, which she isn’t.

“Speaking of being sexist,” she said, and she reminded me of the time I wanted to hire an Occidental College woman undergraduate to work in my office with me and help with my files and books.

“Don’t forget,” she said. “Under equal rights you can’t insist on a woman. You have to take whoever is best qualified.”

I pointed out that I have always preferred the company of women, and that I would not be temperamentally suited to working in close confinement with a man. I like men. I like their company. But I would not want to be dependent on one for intimate services.

My wife called a couple of agencies that handle such help and the manager of one said she had just the woman. She recently spent four years taking care of a man and his wife who were invalids. The man was in a wheelchair. The woman finally died and the man went to live with relatives.

She sounded all right and she agreed to visit us at our house for an interview. One thing she had to be able to do, of course, was drive, because she had to shuttle me to my therapy sessions, to the doctor and perhaps to lunch.

She arrived at our house right on time, though she had taken the back way, the hard way, up the hill. People have been lost for days finding our house.

“I know you can drive,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be here.”

She said she drove a little Dodge Colt but it was big enough for a wheelchair and for me.

Her name is Donnie Ware. I liked the look of her. She is 5 feet 10, and strong. She looks like she could handle anything, including me. She said her son Nathan was 6 feet 8, a Lynwood High basketball star and college prospect.

I decided she would do, but there was one contingency I hadn’t covered. I had been taking a shower every other day, an enterprise so potentially dangerous that my wife had to stand by me throughout.

My wife said she could give me the shower in the evening, after dinner. But I said I would rather have it in the late afternoon.

“Then Donnie will have to give it to you,” she said.

“There’s one thing I have to ask you,” I said to Donnie. “Would it bother you to see me naked?”

“No, not at all,” she said. Somehow I was disappointed.