You Know What They Say About Old People
That's what my mom said. "You know what they say about old people." My heart fell.
"Yeah. I know." The broken hip is the beginning of the end, it's what kills them. The loss of mobility, the feeling of becoming a burden, losing the ability to be self-sustaining (I'm guessing on the last two.) When I read the email that my grandfather fell down the basement stairs and broke his hip that afternoon, I said, "Shit. He's as good as dead."
"Usually they break their hip, then fall," mom said.
Oh.
Not what I expected.
What do I know about old people.
It was a relief that they said something else about old people and their hips. (Shoulda heard what they said about your mom and her hips. Daaaamn!)
It's scary, it's sad, it's inevitable. (I'm realizing that more and more things are inevitable.)
Two weeks later, he's still in the hospital, only know he's got a titanium rod in his leg. But he's got pneumonia, so he's still probably got another week before they send him to rehab. Once he kicks the pneumonia and does two weeks of rehab, he gets to go home.
Turns out that he was in the basement climbing up and fell backwards off the second or third step (I pictured a Hitchcockian tumble down the rough-hewn basement steps into the dankness, lit by a single bare bulb. The only difference between that and reality was the Hitchcockian tumble.) And he broke his femur. And my grandmother carried him upstairs.
You have to understand that this is a typical old, loving couple: together, they weigh probably about as much as I do, and grandma is even smaller than my grandfather. An immigration misunderstanding decades ago couldn't keep them out of this country, a broken leg wasn't going to trap him in the basement.
My grandmother just wants him home. Half a century together, and she still just wants him home. She says if she was able to carry him up the stairs out of the basement, she can take care of anything she has to if he comes home.
When he was on morphine and oxygen, after the surgery, she kept yelling at him, trying to get him to hear her, trying to get him to tell her that it would be okay if she went home for the night.
When she does go home, she can't wait to get back to the hospital. She's been there every day. If someone tries to talk her out of it, that's fine, she says. If no one wants to drive her, she'll walk.
She gets her way.
Last week, a family friend offered to drive her to the hospital one day at 11 a.m. He arrived maybe 10 minutes late. To an empty house. Knocked, rang the doorbell, called the house, nothing.
He called my aunt to let her know. My aunt, obviously worried, called various family members to see if they were with my grandmother. Nope.
Someone decided to call the hospital.
Grandma was there, had been for a little while.
She walked to the hospital.
It's a 45-minute walk or so, to the hospital, for someone my age. It's going to be a longer walk for an 86-year-old grandmother during a Chicago winter.
She walked to the hospital.
At 10:30 a.m., she couldn't wait anymore for that 11 a.m. ride. Maybe she decided that he was supposed to have her at the hospital at 11, or maybe she just got tired of waiting.
She walked to the hospital.
Now whoever's driving shows up at least half an hour early.
Replies: 1 comments
goddamn.
Posted by @ 02/14/05 12:43 p.m. ET