In July, my family acquired a new assistive device called the Hoyer lift. It looks like a torture machine with its dangling chains and numerous metal bars. I half expected it to work the way the machine in The Princess Bride worked, with me as a whimpering Wesley watching the six-fingered man turn the dial up to 11.

I think I’m mixing up my Christopher Guest movies. Also the lift doesn’t work anything like what I described above. Obviously.

As an aside, any time we watched The Princess Bride in my family when I was growing up,
my brother and I would tell our sister that the creepy white-haired dude from the pit of despair was her husband. That’s just the kind of nice kids we were.

The way the lift actually works is that I am rolled onto a mesh net every morning, and my dress is pushed up to my lower back, leaving my bare ass hanging out of a hole in the net so that I am able to use the toilet. It is the height of dignity. But it’s also critical, because lifting me manually takes a toll on my caregivers. I will happily swing around in a perverted hammock if it means taking better care of the people who are taking care of me. Read More>