Creative solution

At $7.50 an hour, the pay was lousy. The work wasn’t pretty, either — scrubbing toilets and emptying Depends-stuffed trash cans.

But the location was ideal. Michelle landed a housekeeping job at the newly opened Carrington Place at Botetourt Commons — the same nursing home where she’d found Michael a Medicaid-designated bed.

Michelle arrived hours before her housekeeping shift with plenty of time to check on Michael. During lunchtime and breaks, she was at his side. She watched the speech and physical therapists work with her husband and then mimicked their exercises when they were gone.

It had been several months since the incident, and Michael was still unresponsive, borderline vegetative.

Every day his roommate would say, “Good morning, Michael!” Every day Michael said nothing in return.

By the end of summer, he could grunt hello. But the words were coming too slowly, Michelle thought.

She spent months persuading his doctor to take him off Ritalin, a drug that was meant to stimulate his brain but in reality, Michelle believed, was shutting it down.

The staff at Carrington noticed how good she was with the patients. They encouraged her to become certified as a nursing assistant, which would boost her wages and offer after-hours and weekend-rate pay.

Michelle sits with a cup of coffee and the Bible to pray for strength and guidance.

By late fall, Michael was finally progressing. Michelle’s instincts about the Ritalin had been right.

“Before, it had always been a guessing game, but now he was telling you, ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I’m thirsty,’ ” recalled Carla Davis, who came daily to see her mother, another Carrington resident.

Michelle and Carla had become tight — like sisters, everyone said. When Carla was gone, Michelle kept an extra eye on her mother, and Carla did the same for Michelle with Michael.

Every night they talked on the phone. Sometimes they treated themselves to Monday night pork chops at the nearby Cracker Barrel restaurant — only to promise the next day to return to their diets. Michelle, a stress eater, had gained 50 pounds since Michael’s aneurysm but with Carla’s nudging had managed to lose a few.

One day in the spring of 2007, Carla walked in to Carrington and said, “Hey, Michael, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he said, shocking her with his sudden, lucid response. “What are you doing?”

“Whenever he said something or did something new, it was like a holiday,” Carla recalled. “It was like a child taking his first step.”

Michael was talking now, and most of what he said even made sense.

It wasn’t just progress, Michelle told her best friend. It was a miracle.