Yesterday was Grandpa's first full day at the rehabilitation center. My uncle spent most of it with him, seeing how he settled in. Grandpa kept wanting to go home. He didn't like the food. He didn't think the therapy was going to help. He started fishing around for the answers they wanted to hear, in an effort to secure his release. (I'm sure they've heard every trick in the book, at this place - the proof's still in the pudding, and you can't fake whether or not you can walk on your own two feet.)
Today, Mom and Dad visited him during lunch. He was smiling. He was happy. He liked the food now. He'd started talking to people, and he was doing so many things. He stayed awake for his entire meal - which he hasn't done reliably since before Xmas. He still has some short-term memory issues, but he had them before the Killer Furnace Incident. (To be perfectly honest, I'm not seeing a real difference between the Before and After Grandpas at this point - which is really amazing, considering how close to death he was, and how "off" he was when I saw him in the hospital.)
Maybe it's because he knows he's going home eventually - it's a "when" not an "if." Maybe it's being made to do something other than sit and rot in a recliner all day while other people did everything for him. Maybe it's being around people, in a new place. But he's starting to act more like the older Grandpa, the one who had some age-relating fuzzing of the brain but who still enjoyed doing things, who still thought, who still wanted to be more than deadweight in his own living room.
So, maybe he needed this all along... or something like this, without the nearly-dead part.
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The thing that blew me away was when he actually thought of having you or I with him for a while to help out when he comes home! I mean seriously, after last Xmas I didn't think we were on the radar at all anymore!
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