Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 October 2007 08:28:10
My mother-in-law is all the Mama I've got left now, as I've said to her a few times.
What time is it --
<<stares bleary-eyed at the clock upper right screen, girl, yer memory's toast...>>
Aaaagh, after 1 a.m.
Just got home from the hospital. Grandma (mom-in-law) fell again.
This is nothing new -- I've probably told y'all before, she makes an almost weekly event out of a spectacular fall. Only the grace of God and cast-iron dairy-loving bones have saved her from the sadly too-common scenario re: the elderly and their decline to death after fracturing a pelvis...
Anyway, last week she fell and cut her head, managed to give herself a fancy black eye and a terribly squeam-making bloody temple. She hasn't been one to hurt her head in her falls; usually if she has anything besides terribly sore muscles it's been a bruised hip, thigh, forearm, etc.
Tonight she did it again but did it up proper this time. Grandpa called, said Grandma had darn near scalped herself, and he couldn't handle Grandma alone. Moving her when she's fallen, if it's one of those times when she cannot provide any effort herself, is like trying to move a 200-pound sack of Jell-O.
I bet he tried me first but I'd left my phone at home. He reached Hubby's phone as we sat over a very late diner dinner -- so we paid the bill for our half-eaten meal, and burned rubber out of there.
Got to their house, trundled Grandma and her forehead-wide bone-deep blood-fountaining injury to the van in her wheelchair, and took off.
I think the Spouse secretly wants to be an ambulance driver. 25 years ago one of our children was born after a wild ride with him out to that hospital. He flipped on the hazard blinkers and took off the same way tonight.
Totally ignored the Sheriff's Deputy he whizzed past... When the perturbed officer drove up alongside us, out the window flew his arm, signaling the cop to come with us to the hospital, and forth went his football-field bellow: "My mother fell and gashed her head open. I'm taking her to the hospital."
Then off he went, rolling through stop signs and stoplights, at least 10 and sometimes 30 or 40 miles an hour over the speed limit.
And the deputy meekly followed along in our wake.
Meanwhile little round-dumpling Grandma is in the middle row of van seats with me, trying desperately to keep sitting upright. No such luck of course, even with me there to try to support her. By the time we reached the ambulance bay at Emergency, she was hanging half off the seat, poor heart, and I was all over blood.
What luck I was wearing a blood red outfit tonight.
We roared up to the entrance -- Hubby runs in, out he comes with our church-mate Cynthia, who works as an ER aide. We see her more often, bringing Grandma there, than we do at church!
The deputy meanwhile had followed in -- perhaps his presence explained the quick return of Cynthia with the wheelchair, 'cause all too often I've seen battered bloody people sitting around the waiting area for the paperwork process.
Either that, of they simply don't allow bleeding people to stagger around like they used to, due to today's list of bloodbourne pathogens.
Got Ma settled in, with Dad, in an ER exam room; gritted my teeth through the intake nurse asking all the same lame questions they have to ask when you come in. (Why the hell they cannot simply send to Medical Records 50 feet down the hallway for some of that info I dunno...)
I imagine they'll have her for hours and hours, into tomorrow evening maybe -- they'll likely want a CAT scan.
And if they pull the usual lunacy of not listening to the family members present, they will probably try to sedate claustrophobic Grandma with whatever that drug was that drove her psychotic last time.
Heh. Good luck getting a decent scan, people.
I told Grandma that she should get a price list for popular procedures out of that plastic surgeon when s/he comes to sew up her forehead. Not for herself -- for me and my wrinkles.
So -- I have all the towels we threw into the van, and my clothes, and Grandma's nightgown, etc., in a cold wash right now.
Off to bed I'll be going -- by the time I get done it might be 2:30 a.m. -- and I need to be up by 5 a.m. because I'm an election commissioner and we need to be at the polls at 5:30.
I might get a real life one day.