The broken hip

Hospital room view

Mom fell in her room Tuesday afternoon and broke her hip. Scraped her arm and knee pretty good, and said she waited "an hour" for the aides to find her writhing on the floor. But 10 minutes to Mom feels like an hour, and it might not have even been 10 minutes.

She had surgery Wednesday evening, and it helped moderate her pain, but if she walks again, I will be surprised. She fell using her walker, and before and after her fall of a week and half ago, she has had regular near-falls with her walker, and has gotten less and less steady on her feet.

It's been a difficult week, trying to finish my work, running to the hospital and back, sitting with her, she and I both bored, and waiting in the waiting room, me just as bored. Her thoughts and speech have been jumbled, and today when the case manager at the hospital called and said that, "because of her confusion," they would invoke my power of attorney in her move back to her place (to the rehab unit there), it shocked me a little. Not that I haven't been doing that work, taking that responsibility, right along -- but to hear from an outside professional what we privately observe as her wild state of mind threw into stark terms the depth of her decline.

Laying in bed, she has rambled intricately and impossibly between her old home, her summer place, the hospital, her elderly care place, and between people present and gone, bringing up her mother, her childhood, me, my dad, her children, somehow confusing them with Julie. When the nurses ask her a question, she'll answer in a reasonable tone, and with proper head-nods of emphasis, such a pastiche of utter nonsense that they are forced to answer "OK, OK," and look to me for an answer.

If I'm there.

I'm not going today. It took a broken hip to get her the constant care and attention she so craves, and she is well occupied. When they leave the room, she gets somebody to call me and when I answer she complains to me bitterly that the hospital staff is "not doing anything. I'm just lying here and they're not doing anything." It makes me want to scream.

The care, the need, the time she requires will only grow when she leaves the hospital -- likely tomorrow -- and settles into some unsatisfactory new state of life.

My friend Tom, and others I know, have said their elderly parents never recovered from a broken hip, and some died right there at the hospital. I don't wish for that -- and yet she is leaving bit by bit.

That same orchid