News From the Front

It has been an uncommonly rough couple of days. I kept a notebook, complete with drawings, or, well, one drawing, which I will hopefully get around to blogging more completely, but since M is home and hovering anxiously behind my chair, I'm just going to set the quick facts down here for the interested.

Thursday evening my mother had surgery on her nose. It took four hours, which I spent hanging around Mission Hospital. She came out of it okay, if whacked out of her skull on drugs, and so we (A & I) took her home and gave her some more drugs. At 1:30 Friday morning she decided to get out of bed to go to the bathroom and she fell. Hard.

A lot happened between 1:30 a.m. and 7:15 a.m. when the ambulance came, and I'll write about it all maybe sometime. One thing that didn't happen was Felicity going to sleep. At 7:30 a.m. Friday we were back at the same damn hospital and by 1:00 p.m. we had figured out, thanks to numerous tests, that she had fractured her pelvis in 3 places. By 5:00 p.m. she had a hospital room; M had kindly been brought home from Celo by school staff, and I had slept for an hour.

We don't know how long she'll stay in the hospital; probably not long. A fractured pelvis doesn't seem to be a huge issue, although horribly painful, although then this evening she said that a nurse had said that the CAT scan showed that her hip was broken too, but I don't know if that's true or not. She's kind of fading in and out of consensus reality a bit. So, when she leaves Mission, she'll go either to the skilled nursing wing of the retirement community where she lives or to Thoms Rehab. Somehow she'll also need to get the stitches out from the surgery yesterday and then on October 17 she needs to have the second installment of this surgery. Meanwhile I need to find someone to show me the damn CAT scan, find another doctor other than the one MAHEC assigned to her, who neither of us liked, and anyway that relationship got off to a rocky start when my mother, 110 pounds and stoned to the gills on morphine, picked a fight with him immediately and I backed her up.

I am kind of wiped out. A has been an incredible, wonderful, help & pillar of strength, but I tell you that dealing with a parent who has always been the picture of decorum and modesty and is kind of an Emily Post meets Martha Stewart clone who is suddenly on the physical level of an infant is hard, very goddamn hard. It has been maybe one of the roughest 36 hours or so of my life on several levels. And I feel selfish for even thinking of myself right now, because my mother, who on Tuesday morning had not a thing in the world wrong with her, is now looking at not being able to walk or even sit up alone for some weeks if not longer, and meanwhile, her head is held together by Frankensteinian stitches and her nose is not her own.

On the bright side all the adrenalin and stress seems to have chased my cold and bronchitis away. Hopefully forever.