Fallen

Mom, 4 AM, Saturday, August 18th

I am doing time in a hospital ER again.

It's 3 AM again (actually nearly 5 by now).

There was a phone call at 2.

2 AM phone calls are NEVER good news.

That it came today, when we were back home in the city, returned just this past evening from our Berkshires vacation was a blessing. But also, of course, a curse.

So here I am, again, on 2 hours of sleep again, with my poor hurting mother.

What happened was: she fell. Again.

Mom fell in the bathroom of the nursing home where she now lives. The aide who had brought her in there was being kind, giving her some requested "privacy" for a moment, so had stepped back, was hovering just outside the (open) door.

But Mom forgot that she was supposed to ask and wait for help when she was done and attempted to get up by herself. You can see what a good idea THAT was.

She fell, hard; clonked her head but good on the sink. Additional assorted body parts also made contact with surfaces harder that they should have. And she was sent off to the local ER to rule out fractures, brain bleeding & other such fun stuff.

When I arrived at the ER, I took this picture. Believe it or not the eye looks much worse now, a veritable goose-size egg rising under the purple, bleeding surface of her lid and brow.

And yet, my mother, being my wonderful mother, still has a sense of humor about it.

She kept asking "Why can't I open my right eye?" (Yes, her short-term memory issues are so bad she kept forgetting what had happened to bring her into the hospital. Albeit the percocet may have contributed to the fog.) So I showed her the picture.

Her response: "But you should see the other guy!"

And also she managed to look on the bright side: "Doesn't my hair look great?" Love that mother of mine. (Wonder no more where I got my gallows humor from. And my father was even worse.)

So.

Here we go again.

On the up side... astonishingly, unbelievably, no bones were broken. Her ribs, elbow, hip are bruised. Skull: intact, with no brain bleeds.

Just one massive, ugly shiner-to-beat-all-shiners.

Oh, and also maybe it's a good thing that something landed her in the hospital, because as they were doing all those x-rays to see if she'd broken anything, they found some fluid in her chest. At first they thought it was maybe in her lungs, and that she was brewing a pneumonia, but then concluded it was around them, in the pleural area, and she was instead in the wee early phase of an incipient heart failure.

Which they are now fixing.

So yes, obviously she was admitted into the hospital.

Good thing I wasn't going to that family wedding this weekend, after all.