More than two months after suffering a brain hemorrhage, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) has left a Washington hospital and entered a private rehabilitation facility, his office said yesterday.
I wish Tim Johnson a continued, smooth and speedy recovery. By the way, I wonder if Johnson's health insurance covers private rehabilitation? That's got to be incredibly expensive, no?
Hospitals these days kick people out after 30 days or so and put them into these secondary facilities.
I imagine he's not dealing with what most American deal with in terms of a long illness....being treated like a sack of potatoes, but that news
might not be so great and he may have been severely disabled
to potentially something that one can recover from with real rehab.
My wife, Bonnie, had a brain hemorrhage 13 years ago. She had the burst artery clipped with a titanium clip, spent two weeks in intensive care, another 10 day in not-so-intensive care, and then came home with a horseshoe-shape scar on her head the size of my hand.
Two weeks later she was at the computer writing her syndicated column. She was typing very slow and a column that used to take her a couple or 3 hours to write took 3 days, but the important part was that she was all there, if a bit slow.
Bonnie still suffers from the event--headaches, some words slip out of her head, but she's still all there, capable, willing and able to work, even after all the trauma. Quite a miracle, really and quite a thing to happen in your first year of marriage.
Every day's a blessing here in Louisville.