One Stroky’s Journey: Rehab guides

I have delayed posting about my therapists at Singing River Comprehensive Rehab Center because I kept searching for the picture I thought I had taken of a key individual in the days of my inpatient rehab experience there. 


“Okay self,” the voice of reason said. “Enough with the procrastination. It’s been five months. Go without the photo, for goodness sakes.”

As often happens, self is creative when it comes to procrastination, clearly passive aggressive in dealing with the voice of reason. “But I’m not satisfied with the word ‘guides’ in the title,” self whined. “It’s too ho hum a word to fit all my spectacular therapists at Singing River.”

“Then check out synonyms for "guide" at Thesaurus.com. Duh!”

I’ll admit it. The voice of reason does occasionally come up with a good idea. Turns out Thesaurus.com offered 42 synonyms here for “guide,” which the entry defined as “something that or someone who leads.”

Self is also lazy and promptly eliminated those synonyms that required further research in the form of looking up definitions. That left 40. Another 34 fell to self’s verbal pickiness. Self has strong ideas about how well a given word works in a specific context.

That left six candidates: genie, genius, guiding spirit, guru, mentor, teacher.

“Guru” fell next for purely superficial reasons. “Guru” conjured up visions of emaciated males in unadorned white robes. That wasn’t politically correct, but self didn’t care. The therapists in question were vibrant, pulled-together young women who, even in scrubs, always looked great and who could brighten the stroke survivor’s early days in rehab just by showing up.

“Mentor” and “teacher” were on target and serviceable. “Guiding spirit” worked better as “healing spirit.” But there are two words that best capture the nature of the results produced by the therapists at both Singing River Rehab and more recently Ocean Springs Hospital Neuro Rehab. The critical considerations are that these individuals are geniuses at combining knowledge and experience to help me work through challenges specific to my stroke. And they have strategically applied what I am convinced is a bit of rehab magic. The chosen words? “Genius” and “genie,” of course. Make that “rehab genius” and “rehab genie.”