Mom fell yesterday and was sent to the ER. She'd been in bed and reached for something on her little rolling table, and maybe she hit the table, or maybe the floor. They found her on all fours on the floor, with, strangely, pillows under her knees.
Anyway, she got a couple of nasty-looking cuts on her forehead, one of which swelled like half an egg. I met her at the ER and we sat for a glum three hours while doctors and nurses came and went, and mostly went. They did a CT scan and took x-rays of her knees, and none of it showed any serious injury.
She was wild-eyed, haggard and indignant at the long waits -- 10 minutes to her is like three hours. She kept telling me to go and get somebody, but of course nothing was going to happen until they were good and ready for it to happen. She had to pee, she said, and a nurse did it with a catheter, drained her completely, and 10 minutes hadn't passed before she said she had to pee again. So they tried a bedpan, but of course she couldn't pee, but as soon as they took it away she said she had to pee again.
I'm inexplicably peeved at the hospital's -- what is it? -- culture? All these young hyper-fit nurses and assistants, male and female, sashaying around flirtatiously in their pajamas. It's like a slumber party. We pressed Mom's call button at one point -- "just press that and we'll come right away," we'd been told -- and nobody ever came. I even called out to a passing nurse at one point, and she glanced at me and just kept going. If she worked for me -- if I was her boss -- I'd have fired her on the spot.
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I've been fighting a cold -- slept almost four hours this afternoon and woke up wondering what planet I was on. So I'm sure I'll have a long, sleepless night.
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