In this intimate audio diary recorded on August 2, 2019, Lyn Goffaux invites listeners into a candid moment of her recovery as she transitions from the hospital to a nursing home for a required 30‑day stay to qualify for in‑home support. With gentle humor and clear-eyed honesty, she reflects on the maze of Medicare, the uncertainty of Medicaid eligibility, and the very real cost of being in rehab care for several weeks. Lyn shares the small, sensory details that define her days: a roommate who keeps the room dark and the TV on all night, sleeplessness and lingering fatigue, and meals that simply don’t compare to the home cooking and personal rhythm she dearly misses.
As she talks through her lunch of tapioca pudding and unsatisfying drinks, Lyn reveals how appetite, routine, and comfort shift when you are living on someone else’s schedule. Yet woven through her complaints is a deep sense of gratitude and self-awareness; she acknowledges how well the staff treats her and jokes about being “spoiled rotten,” even as she longs for her own table and timetable. Her reflections move easily from the practical to the philosophical, turning everyday frustrations into insights about patience, aging, and what it means to surrender control without losing dignity.
Lyn also looks back to her earlier years working in a nursing home in the 1990s, now seeing life from the other side of the caregiver–patient relationship. A simple encounter with a man pushing a carpet cleaner becomes a moment of affirmation as she reminds herself—and us—that patients are “important people,” the very reason the facility exists. She delights in having her name written on her walker, talks about taking it to the gym, and muses on the challenge of “being patient” while you are, quite literally, a patient.
Throughout the episode, her storytelling is warm, conversational, and unpolished in the best way, as if you were sitting at her bedside hearing “a little piece” of her life in real time. She mentions the sling for her recently broken arm, contrasting the memory of a once strong arm with its current limitations, and captures the clutter—physical and emotional—that comes with recovery. This episode is a tender snapshot of resilience, dependence, and identity in late life, offering comfort and companionship to anyone who has navigated rehab, cared for an elder, or wondered how to hold on to themselves in an institutional setting.
