In six months, they'll tell me what my new bottom line is-- my new baseline is going to be. And the last time I got tested, it was still below normal, what the average person is. It was still below that bottom line. I was considered mildly cognitively impaired-- like almost the level of an Alzheimer's patient.

What do you do with that information? When an accident makes you no longer depressed. I was passively suicidal my whole life until I had the accident. Now I want to live. With no ability to really do anything, I have the mind of going, let's do everything. I can't.

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We weren't always houseless. When we went away for our anniversary and we got married, while we were away, there was an eviction notice put on my door. We ended up being evicted. I mean, at one point, I was in out of a wheelchair. So there was a lot going on. I couldn't carry any gear on my back. We had to leave everything behind-- our cat, everything.

The reason we were stuck being houseless was because back in the day, if you were ever on HUD and you got evicted from HUD, you could not sign a government paperwork for five years. So I had never been on HUD in my life before, so I didn't even know what the hell it was. And so I was forcibly evicted and now I couldn't do anything, go on any kind of subsidized housing, anything for five years.

So we were underneath the Hawthorne Bridge and so we got swept. And we weren't really near anybody, but we were close to OMSI. But they were sweeping everybody. So we left there, we went near the-- went right next door because I didn't want to park too close to the garden. We were right next door to it. Where Hazelnut Grove is right now is where we started.

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Five years go by. We ended up getting an RV through a friend of ours. I left the RV to go see my dad, who was having knee surgery, and I got hit and killed by a drunk driver in Texas while visiting-- They called and they said, if you don't come down here and sign the paperwork, we're going-- we don't feel like dealing with Dash anymore.

And I'm like, that's not my problem. I am literally laying in a bed, can't move, just got hit and killed-- well, we're just gonna have to get rid of you? And they pulled RV out of where it was and dropped him off on the side of the road. I called around to some of the people that helped us to Hazelnut and they said, look, go to-- I want to make some phone calls, go to Charles Jordan. Go to the community center there and they will take you.

And so we went there, and that's how we ended up going with Do Good. Do Good put us around different shelters and then Do Good got us in here. And we moved in here and they were still building it. I said, I don't care, I'll find a way to make it work. It's quiet with the train, that's-- all we hear outside our living room window is the train when it goes by, but not-- it's really quiet.

And I grew up surrounded by horse farms and cornfields. I like quiet. I like hearing the crickets. I've been going to OHSU seeing five doctors there for almost two years. I have OT, PT, neuro PT, pain specialist, speech therapist.

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I still have six or seven black hours a day where I don't remember shit. I won't recognize things, I don't have words like you all just saw. I can't think my way out of a paper bag. If I get really upset, and something goes wrong oh I'm screwed-- with Oscar, I can go up the hill. I can't go up the hill by myself, but with him, I can.

And him being a service dog, I can take him any places once he's certified. So, that's being worked on. Having Oscar makes my life a lot easier because having a service animal that has saved my life twice is definitely an amazing thing.

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I love walking around the river. I grew up a half an hour away from the beach, so I grew up walking the beach all the time. I like it. I like being in nature. It reminds me that I'm OK, that there's a chance that something will change. Because I get to watch change happen all the time.

I'm not used to watching the river come high and low and high, so that's nice. Watching the tide all the time, when I'm walking the dog, I'll see the river come up along the banks like a lot higher. And then I'll see the beach again. So it's nice to see that. It's nice knowing that change is always abundant. And being as Native as I am, I love being able to see certain things even if I don't recognize things anymore like I used to.

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